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SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSOR

IN TIIK

ENGLISH DRAMA

I!Y

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Al'TiloK OF

•STL'inES f>K GRELK K»hls' ' KI-.N.\IS<AX«.I-, IN 1 1 -M.V '

'SKETCIIKS IN ITAl.V AND GRKHik' KTv .

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1884

\.l// tt\'/if>. rtsrrr-fti\

,^^/j^y^ •//: J^rX.

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS

• •

MY NEPHEW

JOHN ST LOE STRACHEY

I DEDICATE THESE STUDIES

RESUMED AND CONTINUED AT HIS REQUEST

^ I

PREFACE.

Between the years 1862 and 1865 I undertook a
History of the Drama in England during the reigns of
Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. With this object
in view I composed a series of essays, embracing the
chief points in that history, and discussing the leading
playwrights from the period of the Miracles down to
that of Shirley. Having so far advanced toward the
completion of this plan, I laid my manuscripts aside,
discouraged partly by ill-health, partly by a conviction
that the subject was beyond the scope and judgment
of a literary beginner.

These early studies I have now resumed. The
present volume is the first instalment of a critical
inquir)'^ into the conditions of the English Drama,
based upon work which I began some twenty years
ago, but which has been entirely re-handled and
revised.

In the space of those twenty years the origins and
evolution of our Drama have been amply treated and
diligently explored by more than one distinguished and

viii PREFACE.

by many competent writers. Professor A. W. Ward's
'History of English Dramatic Literature' supplies
what was conspicuous by its absence from our libraries
in 1862, namely, a comprehensive and excellently
balanced survey of the works of the chief dramatists.
The New Shakspere Society has instituted an ori-
ginal method of inquiry into questions of text, chro-
nology, and authorship. Mr. Swinburne, Professor
Dowden, and Mr. Gosse have published monographs
of fine critical and aesthetic quality. Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt, Mr. Churton Collins, Mr. A. H. Bullen, and
the late Richard Simpson — to mention only a few
prominent names — have enriched our stores of ac-
cessible documents with plays reprinted from rare
copies or published for the first time from MS. Pro-
fessor Arber and Dr. Grosart have placed at the
student's disposition masses of useful materials, ex-
tracted from sources inaccessible to the general reader,
and edited with unimpeachable accuracy. American
scholarship, meanwhile, has not been altogether idle
in this field ; while German criticism has been volumi-
nously prolific.

To mention all the men of distinction whose varied
labours have aided the student of Elizabethan Dramatic
Literature during the last twenty years, would involve
too long a catalogue of names and publications.

I may well feel diffidence in bringing forth my own

PREFACE. ix

Studies to the light of day, after this computation of
recent and still active workers on the subject. Eliza-
bethan Dramatic Literature is a well-defined speciality,
important enough to occupy a man's life-labours. I
cannot pretend to be a specialist in this department ;
nor have I sought to write for specialists. It has been
my intention to bringthehistory of the English Drama
within the sphere of popular treatment ; not shrinking
from the discussion of topics which are only too
familiar to special students ; combining exposition with
criticism ; and endeavouring to fix attention on the
main points of literary evolution.

I have only to add in conclusion that the present
volume has been produced under the disadvantageous
conditions of continued residence in the High Alps, at
a distance from all libraries except my own. But for
the generous and disinterested assistance rendered me
by Mr. A. H. Bullen, I should almost dread to print
a work of this nature, composed in such unfavourable
circumstances. To this gentleman, so well known by
his edition of Day s works and by his series of Old
Plays in course of publication, my warmest thanks are
due for reading each sheet as it passed through the
press, and for making most valuable suggestions and
corrections, which give me confidence in the compara-
tive accuracy of my statements.

Davos Platz: Noz'. 9, 1883.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

PACE

I. Method of Inquiry — Chronological Limits — Unity of the Subject.
— II. Three Stages in Evolution of the Drama — Stage of Pre-
paration and Formation-^Closed by Marlowe — Stage of perfectly
developed Type — Character of'^akspere's Art — Jonson and
Fletcher — Stage of Gradual Decline. — III. The Law of Artistic
Evolution — Illustrations from Gothic Architecture, Greek Drama,
Italian Painting. — IV. The Problem for Criticism — In Biography
— In History — Shakspere personifies English Genius in his Cen-
tury— Criticism has to demonstrate this. — V. Chronology is
scarcely helpful — Complexity of the Subject — Imperfection of
our Drama as a Work of Art — Abundance of Materials for Study-
ing all Three Stages — Unique Richness of our Dramatic Litera-
ture-— VI. Shakspere's Relation to his Age — To his Predeces-
sors— To his Successors. — VII. Double Direction of English
Literary Art — Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope — Spirit of the Eliza-
bethan Epoch. — VIII. The Elizabethan Inspiration is exhausted
in the Reign of Charles I. — Dramatists of the Restoration — Rise
of the Novel — Place of Novelists in the Victorian Age . i

CHAPTER IL

THE NATION AND THE DRAMA.

I . The Function of a Great Drama — To be both National and Uni-
versal— How that of England fulfilled this — England and the
Renaissance — Fifty Years of Mental Activity. — II. Transitional
Character of that Age in England. — III. Youthfulncss — Turbu-
lence— Marked Personality. — IV. The Italians of the Renaissance
— Cellini. — V. Distinguishing Characteristics of the English —
Superior Moral Qualities — Travelling— Rudeness of Society —
The Medley of the Age.— VI. How the Drama represented

xii CONTENTS.

PAGE

Society — Determination of the Romantic Species — Its Specific
Quality — Materials of Plays — Heywood's Boast. — VII. Imperfec-
tions of the Romantic Style. — VI 1 1. Treatment of Character —
Violent Changes — Types of E\il — Fantastic Horrors. — IX. In-
sanity.— X. Meditations upon Death. — XI. Sombre Philosophy
of Life — Melancholy — Religious Feeling. — XII. Blending of Gay
with Grave — Types of Female Character — Boy-Actors. — XIII.
Comedy of Life and of Imagination — Shaksperian Comedy —
Fletcher's Romantic Comedy and Comedy of Intrigue —
Hybrids between Pastoral and Allegory — Farce — Comedy of
Manners — Jonson. — XIV. Questions for Criticism. — XV. Three
Main Points relating to English Drama. — XVI. National
Public — England compared with Italy, France, Spain. — XVII.
English Poetry — Mr. M. Arnold on Literatures of Genius and
Intelligence — The Inheritors of Elizabethan Poelry. — XVIII.
Unimpeded Freedom of Development — ^Absence of Academies —
No Interference from Government — The Dramatic Art considered
as a Trade and a Tradition.— XIX. Dramatic Clairvoyance
— Insight into Human Nature — Insight into Dramatic Method.
— XX. The Morahty of the Elizabethan Drama, — XXI. Its
Importance in Educating the People — In Stimulating Patriotism
— Contrast with the Drama of the Restoration. — XXII. Im-
provement of the Language — Variety of Styles — Creation of
Blank Verse. — XXIII. History of Opinion on the Drama — De
Quincey's Panegyric 23

CHAPTER in.

MIRACLE PLAYS.

L Emergence of the Drama from the Mystery — Ecclesiastical
Condemnation of Theatres and Players — Obscure Survival of
Mimes from Pagan Times — Their Place in Medieval Society.
— II. Hroswitha — Liturgical Drama. — III. Transition to the
Mystery or Miracle Play — Ludi — Italian Sacre Rappresentazioni
— Spanish Auto — French Mystire — English Miracle. — IV. Pas-
sage of the Miracle from the Clergy to the People — From Latin
to the Vulgar Tongue — Gradual Emergence of Secular Drama.
— V. Three English Cycles — Origin of the Chester Plays— Of
the Coventry Plays — Differences between the Three Sets — Other
Places famous for Sacred Plays. — VI. Methods of Representa-
tion— Pageant — Procession — Italian, French, and Spanish Pecu-
liarities— The Guilds— Cost of the Show — Concourse of People —
Stage Effects and Properties. — VII. Relation of the Miracle to
Medieval Art— Materialistic Realism— Place in the Cathedral —
Effect upon the Audience.— VIII. Dramatic Elements in the

CONTENTS. xiii

PAGE

Miracles — Tragedy — Pathos — Melodrama — Herod and the Devil
— IX. Realistic Comedy — Joseph— Noah's Wife— The Nativity
— Pastoral Interludes. — X. Transcripts from Common Life —
Satire — The Woman Taken in Adultery — Mixture of the Sacred
and the Grotesque. — XI. The Art of the Miracles and the Art
of Italian Sacri Monti 93

CHAPTER IV.

MORAL PLAYS.

I. Development of Minor Religious Plays from the Cyclical
Miracle — Intermediate Forms between Miracle and Drama —
Allegory and Personification. — II. Allegories in the Miracle —
Detached from the Miracle — Medieval Contrastiy Dialogic and
Disputatio9us — Emergence of the Morality — Its essentially
Transitional Character. — III. Stock Personages in Moral Plays
— Devil and Vice — The Vice and the Clown. — IV. Stock Argu-
ment— Protestant and Catholic — * Mundus et Infans.' — V. The

* Castle of Perseverance ' — * Lusty Juventus ' — * Youth.' — VI.

* Hick Scorner' — A real Person introduced — * New Custom'-

* Trial of Treasure' — * Like will to Like.' — VII. * Everyman ' —
The Allegorical Importance of this Piece. — VIII. Moral Plays
with an Attempt at Plot — * Marriage of Wit and Wisdom ' —

* Marriage of Wit and Science' — ^* The Four Elements ' — * Micro-
cosmus.* — IX. Advance in Dramatic Quality — * The Nice Wanton '
— *• The Disobedient Child.' — X. How Moral Plays were Acted —
Passage from the old Play of * Sir Thomas More.' — XI. Hybrids
between Moral Plays and Drama — * King Johan ' — Mixture of
History and Allegory — The Vice in * Appius and Virginia ' — In
*Cambyses' 144

CHAPTER V.

THE RISE OF COMEDY.

I. Specific Nature of the Interlude— John Heywood— The Farce
of * Johan the Husband' — * The Pardoner and the PViar.' — II.
Heywood's Life and Character. — III. Analysis of * The Four P's'
— Chaucerian Qualities of Heywood's Talent. — IV. Nicholas
Udall and * Ralph Roister Doister' — Its Debt to Latin Comedy.
—V. John Still— Was He the Author of * Gammer Gur ton's
Needle ' .^ — Farcical Character of this Piece — Diccon the Bedlam.
— VI. Reasons for the Early Development of Comedy . .184

xiv CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VL

THE RISE OF TRAGEDY.

PAGE

I. Classical Influence in England — The Revival of Learning — Eng-
lish Humanism — Ascham's * Schoolmaster * — Italian Examples. —
II. The Italian Drama — Paramount Authority of Seneca— Cha-
racter of Seneca's Plays. — III. English Translations of Seneca —
English Translations of Italian Plays. — IV. English Adaptations
of the Latin Tragedy — Lord Brooke — Samuel Daniel — Trans-
lations from the French — Latin Tragedies— False Dramatic
Theory. — V. *Gorboduc' — Sir Philip Sidney's Eulogy of it — Lives
of Sackville and Norton — General Character of this Tragedy —
Its Argument — Distribution of Material — Chorus — Dumb Show —
The Actors — Use of Blank Verse. — VI. * The Misfortunes of
Arthur' — Thomas Hughes and Francis Bacon — The Plot — Its
Adaptation to the Gra^co-Roman Style of Tragedy — Part of
Guenevora — The Ghost — Advance on * Gorboduc ' in Dramatic
Force and Versification. — VII. Failure of this Pseudo-Classical
Attempt— What it effected for English Tragedy . . . .211

CHAPTER VIL

TRIUMPH OF THE ROMANTIC DRAMA.

I. Fifty-two Plays at Court — Analysis of their Subjects — The
Court follows the Taste of the People — The * Damon and Pithias '
of Edwards — * Romeo and Juliet * — * Tancred ' and * Gismunda ' —
* Promos and Cassandra.' — II. Contemporary Criticisms of the
Rom«mtic Style — Gosson —Whetstone — Sidney. — III. Descrip-
tion of the English Popular Play — The Florentine Farsa —
Destinies of this Form in England 246

CHAPTER VHL

THEATRES, PLAYWRIGHTS, ACTORS, AND PLAYGOERS.

I. Servants of the Nobility become Players — Statutes of Edward VI.
and Mary — Statutes of Elizabeth — Licences. — 1 1. Elizabeth's and
Leicester's Patronage of the Stage — Royal Patent of 1574 — Master
of the Revels — Contest between the Corporation of London and
the Privy Council. — III. The Prosecution of this Contest — Plays
Forbidden within the City— Establishment of Theatres in the
Suburbs— Hostility of the Clergy. — IV. Acting becomes a Pro-
fession— Theatres are Multiplied — Building of the Globe and

CONTENTS, XV

PAGE

Fortune — Internal Arrangements of Playhouses— Interest of the
Court in Encouragement of Acting Companies. —V. Public and
Private Theatres — Entrance Prices— Habits of the Audience. — VI.
Absence of Scenery — Simplicity of Stage — Wardrobe — Library
of Theatres. — VII. Prices given for Plays — Henslowe — Benefit
Nights — Collaboration and Manufacture of Plays. — VI 1 1. Boy- ^
Actors — Northbrooke on Plays at School — The Choristers of
Chapel Royal, Windsor, PauPs — Popularity of the Boys at
Blackfriars — Female Parts — The Education of Actors. — IX. Pay-
ment to various Classes of Actors — Sharers — Apprentices — Re-
ceipts from Court Performances — Service of Nobility — Strolling
Companies — Comparative Dishonour of the Profession. — X.
Taverns — Bad Company at Theatres — Gosson and Stubbes upon
the Manners of Playgoers — Women of the Town — Cranley's
'Amanda.* — XI. *The Young Gallant^s Whirligig' — ^Jonson's
Fitzdottrel at the Play. — XII. Comparison of the London and
the Attic Theatres 265

CHAPTER IX.

MASQUES AT COURT.

I. Definition of the Masque — Its Courtly Character — Its Partial
Influence over the Regular Drama. — II. Its Italian Origin. — III.
Masques at Rome in 1474 — ^AtFerrarain 1502 — Morris Dances —
At Urbino in 15 13— Triumphal Cars. — IV. Florentine Trionfi —
Machinery and Engines — The Marriage Festivals of Florence in
1565 — Play and Masques of Cupid and Psyche — The Masque of
Dreams — Marriage Festival of Bianca Capello in 1579. — V.
Reception of Henri III. at Venice in 1574 — His Passage from
Murano to San Niccol6 on Lido. — VI. The Masque transported
to England — At the Court of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth —
Development in the Reign of James I. — Specific Character of
the English Masque — The Share of Poetry in its Success. — VI I.
Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones — Italian and English Artists — The
Cost of Masques. — VIII. Prose Descriptions of Masques — Jonson's
Libretti — His Quarrels with Jones — Architect versus Foet — IX.
Royal Performers — Professionals in the Anti-Masque. — X. Variety
of Jonson's Masques — Their Names — Their Subjects — Their —
Lyric Poetry. — XI. Feeling for Pastoral Beauty — Pan's Anni-
versary.— XII. The Masque of Beauty — Prince Henry's Barriers
— Masque of Oberon. — XIII. Royal and Noble Actors — Lady
Arabella Stuart — Prince Henry — Duke Charles — The Earl and
Countess of Essex — Tragic Irony and Pathos of the Masques at
Court. — XIV. Effect of Masques upon the Drama— Use of them
by Shakspere and Fletcher — By Marston and Toumeur — Their
great Popularity — Milton's Partiality for Masques — The * Arcades '
and * Comus' 317

xvi COXTENTS.

CHAPTER X.

ENGLISH HISTORY.

PAGE

I. The Chronicle IMay is a peculiarly English Form — Its Difference
from other Historical Dramas— Supplies the Place of the Epic —
Treatment of National Annals by the Playwrights. — 1 1. Shak-
spere's Chronicles — Four Groups of non-Shaksperian Plays on
English History. — III. Legendary Subjects— * Locrine ' — * The
History of King Leir.' — IV. Shakspere's Doubtful Plays — Prin-
ciples of Criticism — *The Birth of Merlin.' -V. Chronicle-Plays
Proper — * Troublesome Reign of King John ' — * True Tragedy ot
Richard III.' — * Famous Victories of Henry V.' — * Contention of
the Two Famous Houses.'— VI. * Edward III.'— The Problem of
its Authorship — Based on a Novella and on History — The Superior
Development of Situations.- -V^I I. Marlowe's* Edward II.' — Peele's
* Edward I.' — He>'^vood's * Edward IV.' — Rowley's Play on Henry
VIII. — VIII. The Ground covered by the Chronicle F'lays— Their
Utility — Heywood's * Apology 'quoted. — IX. Biographies of Poli-
tical Persons and Popular Heroes — * Sir Thomas More' — * Lord
Cromwell ' — * Sir John Oldcastle' — Schlegel's Opinion criticised
— ' Sir Thomas Wyatt '—Ford's * Perkin Warbeck '—Last Plays of
this Species.- X. English Adventurers- * Fair Maid of the West '
— *The Shirley Brothers'— * Sir Thomas Stukeley'— His Life
— Dramatised in * The Famous History,' &c. — * Battle of Alcazar.' —
XL Apocryphal Heroes — *Fair Em' — * Blind Beggar of Bethnal
Green ' — Two Plays on the Robin Hood Legend— English Par-
tiality for Outlaws— Life in Sherwood—* George a Greene ' — ^Jon-
son's 'S.id Shepherd' — Popularity in England of Princes who
have shared the People's Sports and Pastimes. . . ^d

)'K

CHAPTER XL

DOMESTIC TRAGEDY.

I. Induction to * A Warning for Fair Women * — Peculiar Qualities of
the Domestic Tragedy — Its Realism — Its Early Popularity —
List of Plays of this Description— Their Sources. — 1 1. Five Plays
selected for Examination — Questions of disputed Authorship —
Shakspere's suggested part in Three of these— The different
Aspects of Realism in them.— 1 1 1. * A Warning for Fair Women '
— The Story— Use of Dumb Show— Bye-Scenes— Handlingof the
Prose-Tale— Critique of the Style and Character- Drawing of this
Play— Its deliberate Moral Intention.— IV. *A Yorkshire Tragedy '
— The Crime of Walter Calverley— His Character in the Drama
— Demoniacal Possession.- V. *Arden of Feversham '—Diffi-
culty of dealing with it — Its Unmitigated Horror — Fidelity to

CONTENTS. xvii

PACK

Holinshed's Chronicle— Intense Nature of its Imaginative Realism
—Character of Arden— Character of Mosbie— A Gallery of
Scoundrels — Two Types of Murderers — MichaePs Terror — Alice
Arden — Her Relation to some Women of Shakspere — Develop-
ment of her Murderous Intention— Quarrel with Mosbie — The
Crescendo of her Passion — Redeeming Points in her Character —
Incidents and Episodes. — VI. *A Woman Killed with Kindness'
— The Gentleness of this Tragedy — The Plot — Italian Underplot
adapted to English Life— Character of Mr. Frankford — The Scene
in the Bed-chamber — Character of Mrs. Frankford— Wendoll —
Question regarding the Moral Tone of the Last Act — Religious
Sentiment. — VII. * Witch of Edmonton* — Its Joint-Authorship—
The Story — Female Parts — Two Plays patched together — Mother
Sawyer — The Realistic Picture of an English Witch — Humane
Treatment of Witchcraft in thiis Play 412

CHAPTER XIL

TRAGEDY OF BLOOD.

I. The Tough Fibres of a London Audience — Craving for Strong
Sensation— Specific Note of English Melodrama — Its Lyrical and
Pathetic Relief. — II. Thomas Kyd— * Hieronymo' and * The
Spanish Tragedy* — Analysis of the Story — Stock- Ingredients of
a Tragedy of Blood— The Ghost — The Villain — The Romantic
Lovers — Suicide, Murder, Insanity. — III. *Soliman and Perseda* —
The Induction to this Play — * The Tragedy of Hoffmann.' — IV.
Marlowe's Use of this Form — * The Jew of Malta ' — * Titus An-
dronicus ' — * Lust's Dominion ' — Points of Resemblance between
* Hamlet' and *The Spanish Tragedy' — Use made by Marston,
Webster, and Toumeur of the Species. — V. The Additions to * The
Spanish Tragedy' — Did Jonson make them.^ — Quotation from
the Scene of Hieronymo in the Garden . . •485

CHAPTER Xni.

JOHN LVLY.

xviii CONTENTS,

PAGE

Beauty of the Lyrics — The Novelty of his Court-Comedies. —

VI. Eight Pieces ascribed to Lyly — Six Played before Elizabeth —
The Allegories of their Classic Fables — * Endimion ' — Its Critique.
— VII. * Midas' — Political Allusions — * Sapho and Phao' — * Eliza-
beth and Leicester' — Details of this Comedy. — VIII. * Alexander
and Campaspe ' — Touch upon Greek Story — Diogenes — A Dia-
logue on Love— The Lyrics. — IX. *Gallathea' — Its Relation to
*As You Like It' — * Love's Metamorphosis' — Its Relation to Jon-
son — * Mother Bombie ' — * The Woman in the Moon.' — X. Lyly
as a Master of his Age— Influence on Shakspere — His Inven-
tions ............ 499

CHAPTER XIV.

GREKNE, PEELE, NASH, AND LODGE.

I. Playwrights in Possession of the Stage before Shakspere — The
Scholar-Poets — Jonson's Comparison of Shakspere with his Peers
— The Meaning of those Lines— Analysis of the Six Scholar-Poets.
— II. Men of Fair Birth and Good Education — The Four Subjects
of this Study. — III. The Romance of Robert Greene's Life — His
Autobiogfraphical Novels— His Miserable Death — The Criticism
of his Character — His Associates. — IV. Greene's Quarrel with
Shakspere and the Playing Companies— His Vicissitudes as a
Playwright — His Jealousy. — V. Greene's transient Popularity —
Euphuistic Novels — Specimens of his Lyrics — Facility of Lyric
Verse in England. — VI. Greene's Plays betray the Novelist —
None survive from the Period before Marlowe — * James IV. of Scot-
land'— Its Induction — The Character of Ida — * Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay' — Florid Pedantry a Mark of Greene's Style. —

VII. Peele — Campbell's Criticism — His Place among Contem-
poraries— * Edward I.' — * Battle of Alcazar' — * Old Wives' Tales'
— Milton's * Comus ' — * The Arraignment of Paris ' — * David and
Bethsabe ' — Non-Dramatic Pieces by Pecle. — VI II. 1 homas Nash
— The Satirist — His Oujirrel with Harvey — His Description of a
Bohemian Poet's Difficulties — The Isle of Dogs — His Part in
* Dido, Queen of Carthage' — * Will Summer's Testament' — Nash's
Songs. — IX. Thomas Lodge — His Life— His Miscellaneous Writ-
ings — * Wounds of Civil War.'— X. The Relative Value of these
Four Authors . 534

CHAPTER XV.

MARLOWE.

I. The Life of Marlowe — Catalogue of his Works.— II. The Father
of English Dramatic Poetry — He Fixes the Romantic Type —
Adopts the Popular Dramatic Form, the Blank Verse Metre of

CONTENTS. xix

PACE

the Scholars— He Transfigures both Form and Metre — His
Consciousness of His Vocation. — III. The History of Blank Verse
in England — Italian Precedent — Marlowe's Predecessors —
Modem and Classical Metrical Systems — Quantity and Accent
— The Licentiate Iambic — Gascoigne's Critique — Marlowe's
Innovations in Blank Verse — Pause — Emphasis — Rhetoric a Key
to good Blank Verse — The Variety of Marlowe's Metre. — IV.
His Transfiguration of Tragedy — The Immediate Effect of his
Improvements — He marks an Epoch in the Drama. — V. Colos-
sal Scale of Marlowe's Works — Dramatisation of Ideals — Defect
of Humour— No Female Characters. — VI. Marlowe's Leading
Motive — The Impossible Amour — The Love of the Impossible
portrayed in the Guise — In Tamburlaine — In Faustus — In
Mortimer — Impossible Beauty — What would Marlowe have made
of * Tannhauser ' ? — Barabas — The Apotheosis of Avarice. — VII.
The Poet and Dramatist inseparable in Marlowe — Character of
Tamburlaine. — VIII. The German Faustiad — Its Northern Cha-
racter— Psychological Analysis in * Doctor Faustus ' — The Teu-
tonic Sceptic — Forbidden Knowledge and Power — Grim Justice
— Faustus and Mephistophilis — The Last Hour of Faustus —
Autobiographical Elements in * Doctor Faustus.' — IX. * The Jew
of Malta ' — Shylock — Spanish Source of the Story — An Episode
of Spanish Humour — Acting Qualities of Marlowe's Plays. — X.
* Edward II.' — Shakspere and Marlowe in the Chronicle Play —
Variety of Characters — Dialogue — The Opening of this Play —
Gaveston— Edward's Last Hours. — XI. * The Massacre at Paris'
— Its Unfinished or Mangled Text — Tragedy of * Dido' — Hyper-
bolical Ornament — Romantic and Classic Art. — XII. Marlowe
greater as a Poet than a Dramatist — His Reputation with Con-
temporaries . . ... ... 581

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

I. Method of Inquiry — Chronological Limits — Unity of the Subject. —
II. Three Stages in Evolution of the Drama — Stage of Preparation
and Formation — Closed by Marlowe — Stage of perfectly developed
Type — Character of Shakspere's Art — Jonson and Fletcher — Stage of
Gradual Decline. — III. The Law of Artistic Evolution — Illustrations
from Gothic Architecture, Greek Drama, Italian Painting. — IV. The
Problem for Criticism — In Biography — In History — Shakspere
personifies English Genius in his Century — Criticism has to demon-
strate this. — V. Chronology is scarcely helpful — Complexity of the
Subject — Imperfection of our Drama as a Work of Art — Abundance
of Materials for Studying all Three Stages — Unique Richness of our
Dramatic Literature. — VI. Shakspere's Relation to his Age — To
his Predecessors — To his Successors. — VII. Double Direction of
English Literary Art — Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope — Spirit of the
Elizabethan Epoch. — VIII. The Elizabethan Inspiration is ex-
hausted in the Reign of Charles I. — Dramatists of the Restoration
— Rise of the Novel — Place of Novelists in the Victorian Age.

In attempting a survey of one of the great periods
of literary history, the critic is met with a problem,
upon his conception and solution of which will depend
both method and distribution of material. This initial
difficulty may be stated in the form of questions.
What central point of view can be adopted ? How

SNA KSPERE *S P REDECESSORS,

shall the order of inquiry be determined? Do the
phenomena to be considered suggest some natural
classification ; or must the semblance of a system be
introduced by means of artificial manipulation ?

This difficulty makes itself fully felt in dealing
with what we call Elizabethan Drama. The subject
is at once one of the largest and the narrowest, of the
most simple and the most complex. It ranks among
the largest, because it involves a wide and varied
survey of human experience ; among the narrowest,
because it is confined to a brief* space of time and to a
single nation ; among the most simple, because the
nation which produced that Drama was insulated and
independent of foreign interference ; among the most
complex, because the English people at that epoch
exhibited the whole of its exuberant life together with
an important stage of European culture in its theatre.

Confined within the strictest chronological limits
( 1 580-1630), the period embraced by such a study
does not exceed fifty years. Very little therefore of
assistance to the critical method can be expected from
the mere observation of development in time. Yet the
ruling instinct of the present century demands, and in
my opinion demands rightly, some demonstration of
a process in the facts collected and presented by a
student to the public. It is both unphilosophical and
uninteresting to bind up notices, reviews, and criti-
cisms of a score or two of dramatists ; as though these
writers had sprung, each unaided by the other, into the
pale light of history ; as though they did not acknow-
ledge one law, controlling the noblest no less than the
meanest ; as though their work, surveyed in its entirety,

METHOD OF INQUIRY.

were not obedient to some spirit, regulating and deter-
mining each portion of the whole.

We are bound to discover links of connection be-
tween man and man, ruling principles by which all
were governed, common qualities of national character
conspicuous throughout the series, before we have the
right to style the result of our studies anything better
than a bundle of literary essays. It is even incumbent
upon us to do more than this. In spite of narrow
chronological limitations, it is our duty to show that
the subject we have undertaken has a beginning, a
middle, and an ending in the category of time, and
that the completion of the process was inherent in its
earliest, embryonic stages.

II.

In the history of the English Drama during the
reigns of Elizabeth and James, the conditions which
render a well-ordered inquiry possible were suffi-
ciently realised. Whatever method the critic may
decide on, this at least he must both recognise and
bear in view. He has to deal with a growth of poetry,
shooting complete in stem and foliage and blossom,
with extraordinary force and exuberant fertility, in a
space of time almost unparalleled for brevity. The
unity of his subject, the organic interdependence of
its several parts, is what he has to keep before his
mind.

Three stages may be marked in the short but
vigorous evolution of our dramatic literature. The
first and longest is the stage of preparation and of ten-

B 2

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

tative endeavour. In the second maturity is reached ;
the type is fixed by one great master, perfected and
presented to the world in unapproachable magnificence
by one immeasurably greater. The third is a stage of
decadence and dissipation ; the type, brought previously
to perfection, suffers from attempts to vary or refine
upon it.

In the first stage we trace the efforts of our
national genius to form for itself, instinctively, almost
unconsciously, its own peculiar language of expression.
Various influences are brought to bear upon the people
at this epoch — through the religious conflicts of the
Reformation, through the revival of classical learning,
in the definition of English nationality against the
powers of Spain and Rome, in the contact with Italian
culture. England had not fashioned her own forms of
art before the literatures of other and widely different
races were held up for emulative admiration to our
students. There was a danger lest invention should
be crushed by imitation at the outset Pedantic rules,
borrowed from Aristotelian commentators and the
apes of Seneca, were imposed by learned critics on
the playwright And no sooner had this peril been
avoided, than another threatened. It seemed for a
moment as though our theatre might be prostituted to
purposes of political satire, diverted from its proper
function of artistic presentation, and finally suppressed
as a seditious engine. Meanwhile, a powerful body in
the State, headed by the Puritans, but recruited from
all classes of order-loving citizens, regarded the theatre
with suspicion and dislike.

The native genius of the English people, though

THREE STAGES IN THE DRAMA. 5

menaced by these divers dangers, was so vigorous, the
race itself was so isolated and so full of a robust tem-
pestuous vitality, the language was so copious and vivid
in its spoken strength, the poetic impulse was so power-
ful, that all efforts to domesticate alien styles, all induce-
ments to degrade or scurrilise the theatre, all factious
opposition to the will and pleasure of the people, ended
in the assimilation of congenial and the rejection of
repugnant elements. The style of England, the ex-
pression of our race in a specific form of art, grew
steadily, instinctively, spontaneously, by evolution from
within.

From this first period, which embraces the Miracles,
Moralities, and Interludes, the earliest comedies of com-
mon manners, the classical experiments of Sackville and
Norton, Hughes, Gascoigne, Edwards, and their satel-
lites, the euphuistic phantasies of Lyly, the melodramas
of Kyd, Greene, and Peele, together with the first rude
history-plays and realistic tragedies of daily life, emerges
Marlowe. Marlowe is the dramatist under whose hand
the type, as it is destined to endure and triumph, takes
form, becomes a thing of power and beauty. Marlowe
closes the first, inaugurates the second period.

Over the second period Shakspere reigns paramount ;
perhaps we ought to say, he reigns alone ; although a
Titan so robust as Jonson stands at his right hand,
with claims to sovereignty, and large scope in the
future for the proclamation of his title. We, however,
who regard the evolution of the Drama from the
vantage-ground of time, see that in Shakspere the art
of sixteenth-century England was completed and ac-
complished. It had imbibed all elements it needed

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

for its growth ; comic humour, lyrical loveliness, the
tragic earnestness and intense reality of English
imagination, classical story and Italian romance, the
phantasmagoric brilliancy of shows at Court, the gust
of fresh life breathed into the spirit of a haughty and
heroic nation by the conflicts and the triumphs of a
recent past. The point about Shakspere's art is that
it is Art, mature, self-conscious, working upon given
methods to a single aim. Those methods, the external
forms, of Shakspere s drama had been determined for
him by his predecessors. That aim, the one aim of true
dramatic art, the aim which he alone triumphantly
achieved, was the presentation of human character in
action. To this artistic end all elements, however
various, however wonderfully blent, however used and
scattered with the profuse prodigality of an unrivalled
genius, are impartially subordinated. In order to illus-
trate the single-hearted sincerity of Shakspere as an
artist, it is only needful to observe the exclusion of reli-
gious comment, of marked political intention, of delibe-
rate moralising, from works so full of opportunities for
their display, and in an age when the very foundations of
opinion had been stirred, when Europe was convulsed
with wars and schisms, when speculative philosophy
was essaying fresh I cariair flights over the whole range
of human experience. True to his vocation, Shakspere
never permitted these ferments of the time to distract
him from the poet's task, although he found in them a
source of intellectual stimulus and moral insight, an
atmosphere of mental energy, which makes his plays
the school of human nature for all time.

Shakspere realised the previous efforts of the

THREE STAGES IN THE DRAMA,

English genius to form a Drama, and perfected the
type in his imperishable masterpieces. With him, in
the second period, but after a wide interval, we have
to rank Ben Jonson, who adapted the classical bias of
the earlier stage to England's now developed art, and
Fletcher, through whom the romantic motives borrowed
from Italian and Spanish sources found new and lumi-
nous expression. In the third period we meet a host of
valiant playwrights, led by Webster, Ford, Massinger,
Shirley: none of them mean men. Yet these are
influenced and circumscribed by their commanding pre-
decessors ; limited in their resources by the exhaustion
of more salient subjects ; incapable of reforming the
type upon a different conception of dramatic art ;
forced to affect novelty and to stimulate the jaded
sensibilities of a sated audience by means of ingenious
extravagances, by the invention of strained incidents,
by curious combinations, far-sought fables, monstro-
sities, and tangled plots. After them the type dies
down into inanities and laboured incoherent imitations.

III.

This evolution of our Drama through three broadly
marked stages follows the law of growth which may be
traced in all continuous products of the human spirit.
A close parallel is afforded by the familiar periods of
medieval architecture ; which in all countries of Europe
emerged from Romanesque into Pointed Gothic, the
latter style passing through stages of early purity,
decorative richness, and efflorescent decadence. Greek
dramatic art, obeying the same rule of triple progres-

8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

sion, took its origin in religious mysteries and rites
of Dionysus ; assumed shape at the hands of Thespis
and Susarion, Phrynichus and Cratinus ; received ac-
complished form in the master -works of -/Eschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes ; broke up into
the tragedy of Agathon, Chaeremon, Moschion, the
middle Comedy of Plato and Antiphanes, the new
Comedy of Menander and Philemon. In dealing with
the later stages of the Attic Drama, it is, however,
more proper to speak of divergences from the primi-
tive stock than of absolute decadence. While we have
good reason to believe that Tragedy declined after the
age of Agathon, owing to the same cause which led to
its decline in England — inability to alter or to vary an
established type ; the Comedy of Menander indicated
no such exhaustion of the soil, no diminution of creative
vigour. It was a new form, corresponding to altered
conditions of Greek life ; and in this respect it might
be compared to our own Comedy of the Restoration.

To multiply instances would be superfluous. Yet
I am loth to omit the illustration of this law of artistic
development, which is furnished by Italian painting.
Emerging from Byzantine or Romanesque tradi-
tion, painting traverses the stage of Giotto and the
Giottesque schools ; produces almost simultaneously
in several provinces of Italy the intermediate art of
Ghirlandajo and Bellini, of Mantegna and Signorelli,
of Lippi and Perugino ; concentrates its force in
Raphael. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian ;
then, as though its inner source of life had been ex-
hausted, breaks off into extravagance, debility, and
facile formalism in the works of Giulio Romano, Perino

LAW OF ARTISTIC EVOLUTION,

del Vaga, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro da Cortona, the
younger Caliari and Robusti, and countless hosts of
academical revivalists and imitators. The slovenly and
empty performance of those epigoni to the true heroes
of Italian painting, in which, however, the tradition
of a mighty style yet lingers, may not inaptly be
paralleled by the loose and hasty plays of men like
Davenant and Crowne, by their dislocated plots and
conventional characters, by their blurred and sketchy
treatment of old motives, and by the break-down of
dramatic blank verse into a chaos of rhythmic in-
coherences.

Reverting once more to Gothic architecture, we
notice precisely the same enervation and extravagance,
the same facility of execution combined with the same
formalism and fatuity, the same straining after novelty
through an exhausted method, effects of over-ripeness
and irresistible decay, in the flamboyance of French
window-traceries, the sprawling casements and splayed
ogees of expiring Perpendicular in England.

IV.

The critic, whether he be dealing with the English
or the Attic Drama, with Gothic Architecture or Italian
Painting, has to aim at seizing the essential nature of
the product laid before him, at fixing on the culminating
point in the development he traces, observing the gra-
dual approaches toward maturity, and explaining the
inevitable decadence by causes sought for in the matter
of his theme. With this in view, the analogy between
history and biography, between national genius in one

lo SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

of its decisive epochs and individual genius in one of
the world's heroes, is not to be contemned, provided
we apply it with the freedom of a metaphor. There is
nothing good, beautiful, or strong upon our planet, no
religion and no empire, no phase of polity or form of
art, however the idea of it may survive inviolable in
the memory of ages, however its essential truth and
spirit may abide beyond the reach of change and time,
but in its actual historic manifestation is subject, like a
human being, to birth, development, decay, and dis-
solution.

All the flowers of the spring
Meet to perfume our burying :
These have but their growing prime ;
And man does flourish but his time :
Survey our progress from our birth ;
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.

Such reflections seem trite enough. But they have
a point which either the carelessness of the observer or
the pride of man is apt to overlook. Why, it is often
asked, should such a process of the arts as that displayed
in Italy not have continued through further phases and
a richer growth ? Why should a State like Venice have
decayed ? Why should Ford and Massinger have only
led to Davenant and Crowne ? The answer is that each
particular polity, each specific form of art, has, like a
plant or like a man, its destined evolution from a germ,
its given stock of energy, its limited supply of vital
force. To unfold and to exhibit its potential faculties,
is all that each can do. Granted favouring circumstances
and no thwarting influence, it will pass through the
phases of adolescence, maturity, and old age. But it
cannot alter its type. It has no power at a certain

THE PROBLEM FOR CRITICISM, ii

moment of its growth to turn aside and make itself a
different thing. It cannot prolong existence on an
altered track, or attain to perpetuity by successive
metamorphoses.

Criticism seeks the individuality imprisoned in the
germ, exhibited in the growth, exhausted in the season
of decline. Critical biography sets itself to find the
man himself, what made him operative, what hampered
him in action, what, after all the injuries of chance and
age, survives of him imperishable in the world of
thoughts and things. Critical history seeks the potency
of an epoch, of a nation, of an empire, of a faith ; dis-
criminates adventitious circumstance; allows for re-
tardation, accident, and partial failure ; discerns efificient
factors ; concentrates attention on specific qualities ;
traces the germ, the growth, the efflorescence, and the
dwindling of a complex organism through the lives which
worked instinctively in sympathy for its effectuation.

What differentiates biography and history in the
sphere of criticism is, that the former deals with indi-
viduality manifested in a person, the latter with indi-
viduality, no less complete although more complicated,
in a series and a company of persons. The former
aims at demonstrating the unity of one man's work,
subject to influences which make or mar it ; the latter
exhibits the unity of a work composed of the works of
many men, subject to influences wider and more in-
tricate which make or mar it. In the one case, criticism
has to answer how the man did what he lived to do ;
in the other, how those many men contributed to what
remains for survey as the single product of their several
co-operative lives.

12 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Applying these considerations to the subject of our
study, it is not difficult to see that in Shakspere we
have the culmination of dramatic art in England. To
explain how Shakspere became possible, to show how
he articulated what the nation struggled to express, to
demonstrate how he necessitated a decline, is the
critic's task. The individuality of the Elizabethan
Drama is personified in Shakspere ; and such a study
as I have undertaken is a contribution toward his better
understanding, and through that to a perception of the
age and race which he expounded to the world.

The succession in time of the stages I have tried
to indicate must not be insisted on too harshly. These
stages are observable at a distance better than on close
inspection. The works by which we mark them, over-
lap and interpenetrate. Phenomena present themselves,
defying the strictest systematic treatment, and seeming
to contradict well-grounded generalisations. We are
dealing with an organism compact of many organisms ;
and just as in the intellectual development of a person
it often happens that thoughts of middle life precede
maturity, while youthful fancies blossom on the verge
of age, so here we find a poet of the prime surviving
in the decadence, and verses written in the morning of
the art anticipating its late afternoon. The rapidity
with which the changes in our drama were accom-
plished introduces some confusion. We are sometimes
at a loss whether to maintain the chronological or the
ideal sequence, whether to treat our subject according

THE INTELLECTUAL MILIEU, 13

to the order of time or according to the laws of artistic
structure. Some authors stretch far out beyond their
temporal limit toward the coming group ; others lag
behind, and by their style perpetuate the past. Another
sort seem to stand alone, perplexing classification, re-
fusing to take their place in any one of the groups
which criticism studies to compose.

Lasdy, like every other product of the modern
world, there is nothing simple in the subject. Various
forces combined to start the Drama in London. Various
influences determined its development. For the English
people it embodied a whole European phase of thought
and feeling. It was for them the mirror of the six-
teenth century, the compendium of all that the Renais-
sance had brought to light. It meant for England the
recovery of Greek and Latin culture, the emancipation
of the mind from medieval bondage, the emergence of
the human spirit in its freedom. It meant newly dis-
covered heavens, a larger earth, sail-swept oceans,
awakened continents beyond Atlantic seas. It meant
the pulse of now ascendant and puissant heart-blood
through a people conscious of their unity and strength,
the puberty and adolescence of a race which in its
manhood was destined to give social freedom to the
world. For England the Drama supplied a form com-
mensurate with the great interests and mighty stirrings
of that age. Into all these things it poured the spirit of
that art which only was our own — the soul of poetry.
Sculpture and painting we had none. Music lay yet
in the cradle, awaiting the touch of Italy upon her
strings, the touch of Germany upon her keys. But
poetry, the metaphysic of all arts, was ours. And

14 !SHA}CSPEkE'S PREDECESSOkS,

poetry, using the drama for a vehicle, conveyed to
English minds what Italy, great mother of renascent
Europe, had with all her arts, with all her industries
and sciences, made manifest On man, as on the proper
appanage of English thought, our poets, like a flight of

^ eagles, swooped. Man was their quarry ; and in the
sphere of man s mixed nature there is nothing, save its

• baser parts, its carrion, unportrayed by them.

Reviewing this unique achievement of our literary
genius, the critic is puzzled not only by its complexity,
but also by its incompleteness as a work of art. The
Drama in England has no Attic purity of outline, no
statuesque definition of form, no unimpeachable per-
fection of detail. The total effect of those accumulated
plays might be compared to that of a painted window
or a piece of tapestry, where the colour and assembled
forms convey an ineffaceable impression, but which,
when we examine the whole work more closely, seems
to consist of hues laid side by side without a har-
monising medium. The greatness of the material
presented to our study lies less in the parts than in the
mass, less in particular achievements than in the spirit
which sustains and animates the whole. It is the
volume and variety of this dramatic literature, poured
forth with almost incoherent volubility by a crowd of
poets, jostling together in the storm and stress of an
instinctive impulse to express one cardinal conception
of their art, each striving, after his own fashion, to
grapple with a problem suggested by the temper of
their race and age : — it is the multitude of fellow-
workers, and the bulk of work produced in concert,
that impress the mind ; the unity not of a simple and

t MPJERFECTION OF ROMANTIC DRAM A, 15

coherent thing of beauty, but of an intricate and many-
membered organism, striving after self-accomplishment,
and reaching that accomplishment in Shakspere's art,
which enthrals attention. Our dramatists produced
very few plays which deserve the name of masterpiece.
Yet, taken altogether, their works, although so different
in quality and so uneven in execution, make up one
vast and monumental edifice. The right point of view,
therefore, for regarding them, is that from which in
music we contemplate a symphony or chorus, or in
painting judge the frescoed decoration of a hall, or in
philosophy observe the genesis of an idea evolved by
kindred and competing thinkers, or in architecture
approach some huge cathedral of the Middle Ages.

Surveyed in its totality, the Elizabethan Drama is '
so complex in its animating motives, so imperfect
in its details, that it may well seem to defy analysis.
And yet it has the internal coherence of a real,
a spiritual unity. It furnishes a rare specimen of
literary evolution circumscribed within well-defined
limits of time and place, confined to the conditions of a
single nation at a certain moment of its growth. We
are furthermore fortunate in possessing copious remains
of its chief monuments illustrative of each successive
stage. In spite of the Great Fire, in spite of War-
burton^s Cook, in spite of the indifference of two
succeeding centuries, our stores of plays are abundant
and amply representative. Through these we trace the
seed sown in the Miracles and Interludes. We watch
the root struck and the plant emerging in the fertile
soil of the metropolis. We analyse the several ele-
ments which it rejected as unnecessary to its growth,

1 6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

and those which it assimilated. We pluck the flower
and fruitage of its prime. We follow it to its decay,
fading, and finally cut off by frost. There is no simi-
lar instance of uninterrupted progress in the drama-
tic art. Through lack of documentary evidence, the
origins of the Athenian Drama are obscure. From the
dithyrambic and the Thespian age no remnants have
survived. Our knowledge of the playwrights who com-
peted with Sophocles is fragmentary and vague. The
successors of Euripides owe their shadowy fame to a
few dim notices, a poor collection of imperfect extracts.

VI.

It is not here the place to treat in detail of those
intimate connections which may be traced between the
many writers for our theatre. Suffice it to say that
Shakspere forms a focus for all the rays of light which
had emerged before his time, and that after him these
rays were once more decomposed and scattered over a
wide area. Thus at least we may regard the matter
from our present point of survey. Yet during Shak-
spere s lifetime his predominance was by no means
so obvious. To explain the defect of intelligence in
Shakspere's contemporaries, to understand why they
chose epithets like * mellifluous,' * sweet,* and * gentle,'
to describe the author of * King Lear,' " Othello,' and
* Troilus and Cressida ; ' why they praised his ' right
happy and copious industry' instead of dwelling on
his interchange of tragic force and fanciful inventive-
ness ; why the misconception of his now acknowledged
place in literature extended even to Milton and to

SHAKSPERE AND THE MINOR PLAYWRIGHTS, 17

Dryden, will remain perhaps for ever impossible to
every student of those times. But this intellectual
obtuseness is itself instructive, when we regard Shak-
spere as the creature, not as the creator, of a widely
diffused movement in the spirit of the nation, of which
all his contemporaries were dimly conscious. They
felt that behind him, as behind themselves, dwelt a
motive force superior to all of them. Instead, then,
of comparing him, as some have done, to the central
orb of a solar system, from whom the planetary
bodies take their light, it would be more correct
to say that the fire of the age which burns in him
so intensely, burned in them also, more dimly, but
independently of him. He represents the English
dramatic genius in its fullness. The subordinate play-
wrights bring into prominence minor qualities and
special aspects of that genius. Men like Webster and
Heywood, Jonson and Ford, Fletcher and Shirley, have
an existence in literature outside Shakspere, and
are only in an indirect sense satellites and vassals.
Could Shakspere *s works be obliterated from man's
memory, they would still sustain the honours of the
English stage with decent splendour. Still it is only
when Shakspere shines among them, highest, purest,
brightest of that brotherhood, that the real radiance
of his epoch is discernible — that the real value and
meaning of their work become apparent.

The more we study Shakspere in relation to his
predecessors, the more obliged are we to reverse
Dryden's famous dictum that he * found not, but
created first the stage.' The fact is, that he found
dramatic form already fixed. When he began to work

1 8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

among the London playwrights, the Romantic Drama
in its several species — Comedy, Italian Novella,
Roman History, English Chronicle, Masque, Domestic
Tragedy, Melodrama — had achieved its triumph over
the Classical Drama of the scholars. Rhyme had
been discarded, and blank verse adopted as the proper
vehicle of dramatic expression. Shakspere*s greatness
consisted in bringing the type established by his pre-
decessors to artistic ripeness, not in creating a new
type. It may even be doubted whether Shakspere
was born to be a playwright — whether it was not
rather circumstance which led him to assume his place
as coryphaeus to the choir of dramatists. The defects
of the Romantic form were accepted by him with easy
acquiescence, nor did he aim at altering that form
in any essential particular. He dealt with English
Drama as he dealt with the materials of his plays ;
following an outline traced already, but glorifying each
particular of style and matter ; breathing into the clay-
figures of a tale his own creator s breath of life, en-
larging prescribed incident and vivifying suggested
thought with the art of an unrivalled poet-rhetorician,
raising the verse invented for him to its highest potency
and beauty with inexhaustible resource and tact in-
comparable in the use of language.

At the same time, the more we study Shakspere in
his own works, the more do we perceive that his pre-
decessors, no less than his successors, exist for him ;
that without him English dramatic art would be but
second rate ; that he is the keystone of the arch, the
justifier and interpreter of his time's striving impulses.
The forms he employs are the forms he found in

SHAKSPERE AND THE MINOR PLA YWRIGHTS. 19

common usage among his fellow-craftsmen. But his
method of employing them is so vastly superior, the
quality of his work is so incommensurable by any
standard we apply to the best of theirs, that we cannot
help regarding the plays of Shakspere as not exactly
different in kind, but diverse in inspiration. Without
those predecessors, Shakspere would certainly not have
been what he is. But having him, we might well afford
to lose them. Without those successors, we should still
miss much that lay implicit in the art of Shakspere.
But having him, we could well dispense with them.
His predecessors lead up to him, and help us to
explain his method. His successors supplement his
work, illustrating the breadth and length and depth
and versatility of English poetry in that prolific age.

It is this twofold point of view from which Shak-
spere must be studied in connection with the minor
dramatists, which gives them value. It appears that a
whole nation laboured in those fifty years* activity to
give the world one Shakspere ; but it is no less mani-
fest that Shakspere did not stand alone, without sup-
port and without lineage. He and his fellow play-
wrights are interdependent, mutually illustrative ; and
their aggregated performance is the expression of a
nation's spirit

VII.

That the English genius for art has followed two
directions, appears from the revolution in literature
which prevailed from the Restoration to the end of
the eighteenth century. Shakspere represents the one

type, which preponderated in the reigns of Elizabeth

c 2

20 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and the first two Stuarts. Ben Jonson represents
the other, less popular during the golden age of the
Drama, but destined to assert itself after the Civil
Wars. Jonson was a learned, and aimed at being a
correct, poet. He formed a conception of poetry as the
proper instrument of moral education, to which he
gave clear utterance in his prose essays, and which
was afterwards advocated by Milton. He taught the
propriety of observing rules and precedents in art.
Under the dictatorships of Dryden and Pope this sub-
ordination of fancy to canons of prescribed taste and
sense was accepted as a law. The principles for which
Jonson waged his manful but unsuccessful warfare
triumphed. The men who adopted those principles
and insured their victory were of like calibre and
quality with Jonson — Titans, as the case has been
well put, rather than Olympians.

The object of these remarks is to point out that the
Elizabethan Drama contained within itself, in the work
of our second greatest playwright, the germ of a new
type of art, which only flourished at a later period.
The critic must not neglect the difference between
Jonson's method and that of his contemporaries, while
at the same time he shows to what extent Jonson sub-
mitted to the spirit that controlled his age. What that
spirit was, cannot in this place be described. Its analysis
may more fitly be reserved for the conclusion of these
studies. Yet some broad points can here be briefly
indicated. It was a spirit of civil and religious freedom,
in the interval between discomfited Romanism and
Puritan victory ; a spirit of nationality mature and
conscious, perplexed as yet by no deeply reaching

SPIRIT OF ELIZABETHA2\ DRAMA, 21

political discords such as those which later on confused
the hierarchy of classes and imperilled the monarchical
principle. It was a spirit in which loyalty to the person
of the sovereign was at one with the sense of national
independence. A powerful grasp on the realities of life
was then compatible with romantic fancy and imagina-
tive fervour. The solid earth supported the poet ; but
while he never quitted this firm standing-ground, he
held a wand which at a touch transmuted things of fact
into the airy substance ot a vision. Contempt for studied
purity of style and for the artificial delicacies of senti-
ment was combined with extraordinary vigour and
vividness in the use of language, running riot often in
extravagance and verbose eccentricity, and also with the
most sensitive perception of emotional gradations, the
most hyperbolical enthusiasms. The moral sense was
sound and homely ; insight into character, acute ; apti-
tude for observing and portraying psychological pecu-
liarities, unrivalled in its elasticity and ease. These
are some of the distinctive qualities shared in common
by our playwrights. It should also be added that their
intolerance of rules, indifference to literary fame, and
haste of composition exposed them all, with one or two
illustrious exceptions, to artistic incompleteness.

VIII.

This chapter in our literature properly closes with
the fall of Charles I. from power. The inspiration of
Marlowe and Shakspere, the true Elizabethan impulse,
had worn itself out. J udging by the latest products of
the Caroline age, I cannot resist the belief that even

22 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

had the Puritans not dealt a death-blow to the stage,
that impulse could scarcely have yielded another suc-
cession of really vital works.

After the Restoration, Dryden and Otway, Congreve,
Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh partly refined
upon some comic and tragic motives, suggested by the
latest of their predecessors, and partly succeeded in
creating a novel style in sympathy with altered social
customs. No one will dispute the piquancy of Con-
greve's dialogue, the effectiveness of the domestic
scenes from town and country life depicted on that
glittering theatre. Yet this brilliant group of play-
wrights stands apart ; isolated by differences of thought
and sentiment, method and language, from their Eliza-
bethan predecessors ; hardly less isolated from their few
worthy successors of the Georgian age.

Far more significant than the vamped-up dramas
of the eighteenth century are the novels which now
take their rise, and which preserve the old dramatic
genius of the English in an altered form. Our time,
which offers so many parallels to that of Elizabeth,
shows its literary character in no point more dis-
tinctively than in its cultivation of prose romance.
Instead of dramas written to be acted, we have novels
written to be read. These are produced in such pro-
fusion, with such spontaneous and untutored licence,
so various in quality and yet upon the whole so ex-
cellent, that the Victorian period vindicates the survival
of that dramatic aptitude which glorified the period of
Elizabeth.

CHAPTER II.

THE NATION AND THE DRAMA.

I. The Function of a Great Drama— To be both National and Universal
— How that of England fulfilled this — England and the Renaissance
— Fifty Years of Mental Activity. — II. Transitional Character of that
Age in England. — III. Youthfulness — Turbulence — Marked Person-
ality.— IV. The Italians of the Renaissance— Cellini. — V. Dis-
tinguishing Characteristics of the English- Superior Moral Qualities
— Travelling — Rudeness of Society — The Medley of the Age. — VI.
How the Drama represented Society^— Determination of the Romantic
Species — Its Specific Quality— Materials of Plays — Heywood^s Boast.
— VII. Imperfections of the Romantic Style. — VIII. Treatment of
Character — Violent Changes — Types of Evil — Fantastic Horrors.
—IX. Insanity. — X. Meditations upon Death. — XI. Sombre Philo-
sophy of Life — Melancholy — Religious Feeling.— XII. Blending of
Gay with Grave— Types of Female Character — Boy-Actors. — XIII.
Comedy of Life and of Imagination — Shaksperian Comedy — Fletcher's
Romantic Comedy and Comedy of Intrigue — Hybrids between
Pastoral and Allegory — Farce — Comedy of Manners — ^Jonson. — XIV.
Questions for Criticism. — XV. Three Main Points relating to
English Drama. — XVI. National Public — England compared with
Italy, France, Spain. — XVII. English Poetry — Mr. M. Arnold on
Literatures of Genius and Intelligence — The Inheritors of Elizabethan
Poetry. — XVIII. Unimpeded Freedom of Development — Absence
of Academies — No Interference from Government — The Dramatic Art
considered as a Trade and a Tradition. — XIX. Dramatic Clair-
voyance— Insight into Human Nature — Insight into Dramatic Method.
— XX. The Morality of the Elizabethan Drama. — XXI. Its Import-
ance in Educating the People — In Stimulating Patriotism — Contrast
with the Drama of the Restoration. — XXII. Improvement of the
Language — Variety of Styles — Creation of Blank Verse. — XXIII.
History of Opinion on the Drama — De Quince/s Panegyric.

At all periods of history the stage has been a mirror
of the age and race in which it has arisen. Dramatic
poets more than any other artists reproduce the life of

24 :SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

men around them ; exhibiting their aims, hopes, wishes,
aspirations, passions, in an abstract more intensely
coloured than the diffuse facts of daily experience.
It is the function of all artistic genius to interpret
human nature to itself, and to leave in abiding form a
record of past ages to posterity ; but more especially of
the dramatic genius, which rules for its domain the
manners, actions, destinies of men. The result attained
by a great drama in those few ages and among those
rare races which can boast this highest growth of art,
is twofold. On the one hand it shows * the very age
and body of the time his form and pressure ; ' it is
strictly local, national, true to the epoch of its origin.
But it is more than this ; It is on the other hand a
glass held up to nature, reflecting what is permanent
in man beneath the customs and costumes, the creeds
and polities, of any age or nation.

These remarks, though obvious enough, contain a
truth which must not be neglected on the threshold of
our inquiry into the origins of the English Drama. If
it be granted that other theatres, the Greek, the Spanish,
and the French, each of which embalms for us the
spirit of a great people at one period of the world's
development, are at the same time by their revelation
of man s nature permanent and universal, this may be
claimed in even a stricter sense for the English. Never
since the birth of the dramatic art in Greece has any
theatre displayed a genius so local and spontaneously
popular, so thoroughly representative of the century in
which it sprang to power, so national in tone and
character. Yet none has been more universal by right
of insight into the essential qualities of human nature,

FUNCTION OF THE DRAMA. 25

by right of sympathy with every phase of human feel-
iJ^gj by right of meditation upon all the problems which
have vexed the human spirit ; none is more permanent
by right of artistic potency and beauty, accumulated
learning, manifold experience, variety of presentation,
commanding interest, and inexhaustible fertility of
motives.

We are led to ask how our Drama came to be in
this high sense both national and universal ; how our
playwrights, working for their age and race, achieved
the artistic triumph of presenting to the world an
abstract picture of humanity so complex and so per-
fect. Questions like these can never be completely
answered. There remains always something inscru-
table in the spontaneous efforts of a nation finely
touched to a fine issue. Yet some considerations will
help us to understand, if not to explain, the problem.
And, in the first place, it may be repeated that the
intellectual movement, to which we give the name of
Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through
the Drama. Other races in that era of quickened
activity, when modern man regained the consciousness
of his own strength and goodliness after centuries of
mental stagnation and social depression, threw their
energies into the plastic arts and scholarship. The
English found a similar outlet for their pent-up forces
in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece
and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe.
Humanism had placed the present once more in a
vital relation to the past. The navies of Portugal and
Spain had discovered new continents beyond the ocean ;
the merchants of Venice and Genoa had explored the

26 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

farthest East. . Copernicus had revolutionised astro-
nomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds
beyond the sun. The Bible had been rescued from
the mortmain of the Church ; scholars studied it in the
language of its authors, and the people read it in their
own tongue. In this rapid development of art, litera-
ture, science, and discovery, the English had hitherto
taken but little part. But they were ready to reap
what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the labours
of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and
sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their
youth and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to
them. For more than half a century they freely enjoyed
the splendour of this spectacle, until the struggle for
political and religious liberty replunged them in the
hard realities of life. During that eventful period of
spiritual disengagement from absorbing cares, the race
was fully conscious of its national importance. It had
shaken off the shackles of oppressive feudalism, the
trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not yet
passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroach-
ments of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of
the Virgin Queen, with whose idealised personality the
people identified their newly acquired sense of great-
ness. During those fortunate years, the nation, which
was destined to expend its vigour in civil struggles and
constitutional reforms between 1642 and 1689, ^^^
then to begin that strenuous career of colonisation and
conquest in both hemispheres, devoted its best mental
energy to self-expression in one field of literature.
The pageant of renascent humanity to which the
English were invited by Italians, Spaniards, and

ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND. 27

Frenchmen, our predecessors in the arts and studies
of two centuries, stimulated the poets of the race to
their dramatic triumphs. What in those fifty years
they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets
wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable.
It is the portrait of their age, the portrait of an age
in which humanity stood self- revealed, a miracle and
marvel to its own admiring curiosity.

II.

England was in a state of transition when the
Drama came to perfection. That was one of those
rare periods when the past and the future are both
coloured by imagination, and both shed a glory on the
present. The medieval order was in dissolution ; the
modern order was in process of formation. Yet the
old state of things had not faded from memory and
usage ; the new had not assumed despotic sway. Men
stood then, as it were, between two dreams — a dream
of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid remi-
niscences ; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited
aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreat-
ing forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of
the modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight
of actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been
softened ; but the chivalrous sentiment remained to
inspire the Surreys and the Sidneys of a milder epoch
— its high enthusiasm and religious zeal, its devotion
to women, its ideal of the knightly character, its cheer-
ful endurance of hardship, its brave reliance on a
righteous cause. The Papacy, after successive revo-

28 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

lutions of opinion, had become odious to the large
majority of the nation ; but Protestantism had not yet
condensed into a compact body of sectarian doctrines.
The best work of our dramatists, so far from reticent,
so comprehensive as it is, reveals no theological ortho-
doxy, no polemical antagonism to dogmatic creeds.
The poet, whether he sounds the depths of sceptical
despair or soars aloft on wings of aspiration, appeals
less to religious principle than to human emotion, to
doubts and hopes instinctive in the breast of man. It
is as though in this transition state of thought, humanity
were left alone, surveying with clear eyes the uni-
verse, sustained by its own adolescent fearlessness and
strength. The fields, again, of wealth, discovery, and
science, over which we plod with measured and
methodic footsteps, spread before those men like a
fairyland of palaces and groves, teeming with strange
adventures, offering rich harvests of heroic deeds. To
the New World Raleigh sailed with the courage of a
Paladin, the boyishness of Astolf mounted on his hip-
pogriff. He little dreamed what unromantic scenes of
modern life, what monotonous migrations of innumer-
able settlers, he inaugurated on the shores of El
Dorado. The Old World was hardly less a land of
wonders. When Faustus clasped Helen in a vision ;
when Miramont protested :

Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on 't j
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils :

both characters expressed the spirit of an age when
scholarship was a romantic passion. Even the pioneers
of science in the seventeenth century were poets.

THE RENAISSANCE. 29

Bruno compares himself upon his philosophic flight to
Icarus. Bacon founds the inductive method upon
metaphors — Idola Speeds, Vindemia Inductionis.
Galileo, to his English contemporaries, is * the Italian
star-wright/

III.

The genius of youthfulness, renascent, not new-
bom, was dominant in that age. * Adam stepped forth
again in Eden, gazed with bold eyes upon the earth
and stars, felt himself master there, plucked fruit from
the forbidden tree. But though still young, though
'bright as at creation's day,' this now rejuvenescent
Adam had six thousand centuries of conscious life,
how many countless centuries of dim unconscious life,
behind him ! Not the material world alone, not
the world of his unquenchable self alone, not the
world of inscrutable futurity alone, but, in addition to
all this, a ruinous world of his own works awaiting
reconstruction lay around him. The nations moved
* immersed in rich foreshado wings ' of the future, amid
the dust of creeds and empires, which crumbled like
'the wrecks of a dissolving dream.* Refreshed with sleep,
the giant of the modern age rose up strong to shatter
and create. Thought and action were no longer to be
fettered. Instead of tradition and prescription, passion
and instinct ruled the hour. Every nerve was sensitive
to pleasure bordering on pain, and pain that lost itself
in ecstasy. Men saw and coveted and grasped at their
desire. If they hated, they slew. If they loved and
could not win, again they slew. If they climbed to
the height of their ambition and fell toppling down.

30 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

they died with smiles upon their lips like Marlowe s
Mortimer :

Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller.
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

Turbulence, not the turbulence of a medieval barony,
but the turbulence of artists, lovers, pleasure-seekers,
aspirants after pomp and spiritual empire, ruffled the
ocean of existence. The characters of men were harshly
marked, and separated by abrupt distinctions. They
had not been rubbed down by contact and culture into
uniformity. Not conformity to established laws of taste,
but eccentricity betokening emergence of the inner self,
denoted breeding. To adopt foreign fashions, to cut
the beard into fantastic shapes, to flourish in parti-
coloured garments, to coin new oaths, to affect a style
of speech and manner at variance with one s neigh-
bours, passed for manliness. Everyone lived in his
own humour then, and openly avowed his tastes. You
might distinguish the inhabitants of different countries,
the artisans of different crafts, the professors of different
sciences — the lawyer, the physician, the courtier, or
the churchman — by their clothes, their gait, their lan-
guage. Instead of curbing passions or concealing
appetites, men gloried in their exercise. They veiled
nothing which savoured of virility ; and even conver-
sation lacked the reserve of decency which civilised
society throws over it.

PERSONALITY IN THE RENAISSANCE/ 31

IV.

Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, presents
a graphic picture of the times ; and what we know of
life in other European countries at that epoch, justifies
us in taking that picture as fairly typical. He and the
Italians of his century killed their rivals in the streets
by day ; they girded on their daggers when they went
into a court of justice ; they sickened to the death with
disappointed vengeance or unhappy love ; they dragged
a faithless mistress by the hair about their rooms ;
they murdered an adulterous wife with their own
hands, and hired assassins to pursue her paramour;
lying for months in prison, unaccused or uncondemned,
in daily dread of poison, they read the Bible and the
sermons of Savonarola, and made their dungeons echo
with psalm-singing ; they broke their fetters, dropped
from castle walls, swam moats and rivers, dreamed
that angels had been sent to rescue them ; they carved
Madonna and Adonis on the self-same shrine, paying
indiscriminate devotion to Ganymede and Aphrodite ;
they confused the mythology of Olympus with the
mysteries of Sinai and Calvary, the oracles of necro-
mancers with the voice of prophets, the authority of
pagan poets with the inspiration of Isaiah and S.
Paul ; they prayed in one breath for vengeance on
their enemies, for favour with the women whom they
loved, for succour in their homicidal acts, for Paradise
in the life to come ; they flung defiance at popes, and
trembled for absolution before a barefoot friar; they
watched salamanders playing in flames, saw aureoles

32 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

of light reflected from their heads upon the morning
dew, turned dross to gold with alchemists, raised
spirits in the ruins of deserted amphitheatres ; they
passed men dying on the road, and durst not pity
them, because a cardinal had left them there to
perish ; they took the Sacrament from hands of pre-
lates whom they had guarded with drawn swords at
doors of infamy and riot. The wildest passions, the
grossest superstitions, the most fervent faith, the
coldest cynicism, the gravest learning, the darkest
lusts, the most delicate sense of beauty, met in the
same persons, and were fused into one wayward glit-
tering humanity. Ficino, who revealed Plato to
Europe, pondered on the occult virtue of amulets.
Cardan, a pioneer of physical science, wrote volumes
of predictions gathered from the buzzings of a wasp,
and died in order to fulfil his horoscope. Bembo, a
prince of the Church, warned hopeful scholars against
reading the Bible lest they should contaminate their
style. Aretino, the bye word of obscenity and im-
pudence, penned lives of saints, and won the praise of
women like Vittoria Colonna. A pope, to please the
Sultan, poisoned a Turkish prince, and was rewarded
by the present of Christ's seamless coat. A Duke of
Urbino poignarded a cardinal in the streets of Bologna.
Alexander VI. regaled his daughter in the Vatican
with naked ballets, and dragged the young lord of
Faenza, before killing him, through outrages for which
there is no language. Every student of Renaissance
Italy and France can multiply these instances. It is
enough to have suggested how, and with what salience
of unmasked appetite, the springs of life were opened

English characteristics. 33

in that age of splendour ; how the most heterogeneous
elements of character and the most incongruous motives
of action displayed themselves in a carnival medley of
intensely vivid life.

What distinguished the English at this epoch from
the nations of the South was not refinement of manners,
sobriety, or self-control. On the contrary, they re-
tained an unenviable character for more than common
savagery. Cellini speaks of them as questi diavoli —
quelle bestie di quegli Inglest. Erasmus describes the
filth of their houses, and the sicknesses engendered in
their cities by bad ventilation. What rendered the ^
people superior to Italians and Spaniards was the
firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness of their
humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated in-
stincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and
religious conscience, contempt for treachery and base-
ness, intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism
combined with fervent love of home and country./
They were coarse, but not vicious ; pleasure-loving,
but not licentious ; violent, but not cruel ; luxurious,
but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a name of loath-
ing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and
Drake were popular heroes ; and whatever may be
thought of these men, they certainly counted no Mar-
quis of Pescara, no Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta
Baglioni, no Cosimo de* Medici among them. The
Southern European type betrayed itself but faintly in
politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert Dudley.

The English then, as now, were great travellers.

34 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Young men, not merely of the noble classes, visited
the South and returned with the arts, accomplishments,
and follies of Italian capitals. A frequent theme for
satire was the incongruity of fashions displayed in the
dress of travelled dandies, their language mixed of all
the dialects of Europe, their aptitude for foreign dissi-
pations. ' We have robbed Greece of gluttony,' writes
Stephen Gosson, * Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride,
France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing.* Nash
ascribes the notable increase of drunkenness to habits
contracted by the soldiers in their Flemish campaigns.
Ascham attributes the new-fangled lewdness of the youth
to their sojourn in Venice. But these affectations of
foreign vices were only a varnish on the surface of society.
The core of the nation remained sound and whole-
some. Nor was the culture which the English borrowed
from less unsophisticated nations, more than superficial.
The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was
the life beneath. Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence
of her nobles, at a gentleman who had displeased her ;
struck Essex on the cheek ; drove Burleigh blubbering
from her apartment. Laws in merry England were
executed with uncompromising severity. Every town-
ship had its gallows ; every village its stocks, whipping-
post, and pillory. Here and there, heretics were burned
upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower
Hill was seldom dry. Sir Henry Sidney, sent to quell
the Irish rebels, * put man, woman, and child to the
sword,' after reading the Queens proclamation. His
officers balanced the amusements of pillage or ' having
some killing,' with a preference for the latter sport
when they felt themselves in humour for the chase.

ENGLISH SOCIETY, 35

Witches and the belief in witches increased ; it was a
common village pastime to drown old women in the
ponds, or to rack and prick them till they made con-
fession of impossible crimes. A coarse freedom pre-
vailed in hock-tide festivals and rustic revels. Lords
of Misrule led forth their motley train ; girls went
a-maying with their lovers to the woods at night
Feasts of Asses and of Fools profaned the sanctuaries
Christmas perpetuated rites of Woden and of Freya
harvest brought back the pagan deities of animal
enjoyment. Men and women who read Plato, or dis-
cussed the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal
practical jokes, relished the obscenities of jesters, used
the grossest language of the people. Carrying farms
and acres on their backs in the shape of costly silks
and laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit of
old banquets. Glittering in suits of gilt and jewelled
mail, they josded with town- porters in the stench of
the bear-gardens, or the bloody bull-pit The church
itself was not respected. The nave of old S. Paul's
became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. Fine
gentlemen paid fees for the privilege of clanking up
and down its aisles in service-time. Dancers and
masquers, crowding from the streets outside in all their
frippery, would take the Sacrament and then run out
to recommence their revels. Men were Papists and
Protestants according to the time of day ; hearing mass
in the morning and sermon in the afternoon, and wind-
ing up their Sunday with a farce in some inn-yard.
It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such cha-
racteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities
of England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this

D 2

36 SHAKi^PERE'S PREDECESSORS.

confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like
Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is
pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate
and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself.
And the masses of the people were still in harmony
with these high strains. They formed the audience
of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored
Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moon-
light at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through
woodland glades of Arden.

VI.

Such was the society of which our theatre became
the mirror. The splendour and ideal beauty of the
world which it presented, in contrast with the semi-
barbarism from which society was then emerging, added
imaginative charm to scenic pageants, and raised the
fancy of the playwrights to the heavens of poetry.
This contrast converted dramatic art into a vivid
dream, a golden intuition, a glowing anticipation of
man's highest possibilities. The poets were Prosperos.
In the dark and unpaved streets of London visions
came to them of Florence or Verona, bright with
palaces and lucid with perpetual sunlight. The ener-
getic passions which they found in their own breasts
and everywhere among the men around them, attained
to tragic grandeur in their imaginations. They trans-
lated the crude violence, the fanciful eccentricities, the
wayward humours of the day, into animated types;
and because they kept touch with human nature, their

THE ROMANTIC DRAMA, 37

transcripts from the life of their own time are in-
destructible.

The form assumed by the Drama in England was
not accidental ; nor was the triumph of the Romantic
over the Classic type of art attained without a vigorous
struggle. Scholars at the University and purists at the
Court, Sidney by his precepts and Sackville by his
practice, the translators of Seneca and the imitators
of Italian poets, Ben Jonson's learning and Bacon's
authority, w^ere unable to force upon the genius of
the people a style alien to the spirit of the times and
of the race. Between the age of Pericles and the
sixteenth century of our era, the stream of time had
swept mightily and gathered volume, bearing down
upon its tide the full development of Greek philo-
sophy and Roman law, the rise and fall of Greek and
Roman Empires, the birth and progress of Chris-
tianity and Islam, the irruption of Teutonic tribes into
the community of civilised races, the growth of modern
nationalities and modern tongues, the formation and
decay of feudalism, the theology of Alexandria, Byzan-
tium, and Paris, the theocratic despotism of the Papal
See, the intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages, the
mental ferment of the Middle Ages, the revival of
scholarship, philosophy, and art in Southern Europe,
and, last of all, the revolution which shook Papal Rome
and freed the energies of man. How was it possible,
after these vital changes in the substance, composition,
and direction of the human spirit, that a Drama, repre-
sentative of the new world, should be built upon the
lines of Greek or Graeco-Roman precedents ? In Italy,
under the oppressive weight of humanism, such a revival

38 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

of the antique forms had been attempted — ^with what
feeble results all students of Italian tragedy are well
aware.^ The instinct of the English, who were destined
to resuscitate the Drama, rejected that tame formalism.
They worked at first without or rule or method. Their
earliest efforts were mere gropings, tentative endeavours,
studies of untaught craftsmen seeking after style. But
they adhered closely to the life before their eyes ; and
their ill-digested scenes brought nature piecemeal on
the stage. The justice of this method was triumphantly
demonstrated by Shakspere; as the justice of the
method of Pisano and Giotto was demonstrated by
Michelangelo and Raffaello. Neither Italian painting
nor English poetry can be called a silver-age revival
of antique art ; because in neither of these products
did the modern mind start from imitation, but initiated
and completed a new process of its own.

The Romantic Drama is of necessity deficient in
statuesque repose and classic unity of design. It
obeys specific laws of vehement activity and wayward
beauty ; while the discords and the imperfections of
the type are such as only genius of the highest order
can reduce to harmony. Aiming at the manifestation
of human life as a complex whole, with all its multi-
formity of elements impartially considered and pre-
sented, our playwrights seized on every salient motive in
the sphere of man's experience. They rifled the stores
of history and learning with indiscriminate rapacity.
The heterogeneous booty of their raids, the ore and
dross of their discovery, passed through a furnace in
their brains, took form from their invention. In no

* See my Renaissance in Italy ^ vol. v. chap. ii.

MATERIALS USED BY THE PLAYWRIGHTS. 39

sense can these men be arraigned for plagiarism or
for imitation, although they made free use of all that
had been published in the past.^ The Renaissance
lent them, not its pedantic humanism, but the deep
colouring, the pulse of energy, the pomp and pride
and passion of its glowing youth. From Italy they
drew romance and sensuous beauty — the names of
Venice and Amajfi and Verona — the lust of lust, the
concentrated malice of that Southern Circe. In Spain
they delved a mine of murders, treasons, duels, in-
trigues, persecutions, and ancestral guilt. Plutarch
taught them deeds of citizens, heroic lives, and civic
virtues. The Elegists and Ovid were for them the
fountain-head of mythic fables. From sagas of the
North and annals of Old England they borrowed the
substance of * King Lear,' * Bonduca,' * Hamlet.' From
the chronicles of recent history they quarried tragedies
of Tudors and Plantagenets. The law-courts gave them
motives for domestic drama. The streets and taverns,
homes and houses of debauch, in London furnished
them with comic scenes. Nor did these materials, in
spite of their incongruous variety, confuse the minds
which they enriched. Our dramatists inspired with
living energy each character of myth, romance, expe-
rience, or story. Anachronisms, ignorance, crudulity,
abound upon their pages. Criticism had not yet begun
its reign. Legend was still mistaken for fact The

* As early as 1 580, Stephen Gosson wrote in his Plays Confuted in
Five Actions : * I may boldly say it because I have seen it, that the
Palace of Pleasure^ The Golden Ass, The ^Ethiopian History, Amadis of
France, The Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in
London.' (Roxburgh Library, The English Drama and Stage, p. 188.)

40 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

tale of 'Cymbeline' seemed to Shakspere almost as
historical as that of * Henry V/ Yet, feeling the reality
of life exceedingly, grasping all shapes through which
they could express their knowledge of themselves and
of the world around them, piercing below the surface to
the heart which throbbed within each image of the fancy,
they converted all they touched to essential realism.
Men and women rose beneath their wand of art from
dusty stores of erudition, from mists of faery land and
fiction. Heywood, here as elsewhere, finely conscious
of the playwright's function, unfolds a map before us of
the ground they traversed, in these lines :

To give content to this most curious age,

The gods themselves we Ve bfought down to the stage.

And figured them in placets ; made even Hell

Deliver up the furies, by no spell

Saving the Muse's rapture. Further we

Have trafficked by their help : no history

We Ve left unrifled : our pens have been dipped,

As well in opening each hid manuscript,

As tracts more vulgar, whether read or sung

In our domestic or more foreign tongue.

Of fairy elves, nymphs of the sea and land.

The lawns and groves, no number can be scanned

Which we Ve not given feet to ; nay, 't is known

That when our chronicles have barren grown

Of story, we have all invention stretched.

Dived low as to the centre, arid then reached

Unto the Primum Mobile above.

Nor scaped things intermediate, for your love.

A noble boast; and not more nobly boasted than
nobly executed ; as they who have surveyed the Eng-
lish Drama from Lyly to Ford, will acknowledge.

QUALITY OF THIS DRAMA, 41

VII.

The variety of matter handled by the playwrights
cannot be said to have affected their principles
of treatment. All themes, however diverse, were
subjected to the romantic style. The same exu-
berance of life, the same vehement passions, the
same sacrifice of rule and method to salience of
presentation, mark all the products of our stage and
give our drama a real unity of tone. In the delinea-
tion of character, we find less of feebleness than of
extravagance ; in the texture of plots, there is rather
superfluity of incident and incoherence of design than
languor. The art of that epoch suffered from rapidity
of execution, excess of fancy, inventive waywardness.
To represent exciting scenes by energetic action, to
clothe audacious ideas in vivid language, to imitate
the broader aspects of emotion, to quicken the dullest
apprehension by violent contrasts and sensational
effects, was the aim which authors and actors pursued
in common. Nor was the public so critical or so ex-
acting as to refine the drama by a demand for careful
workmanship. What the playwright hastily concocted,
was gfreedily devoured and soon forgotten. The
dramatists employed distinguished talents in pouring
forth a dozen plays instead of perfecting one master-
piece. The audience amused themselves with

Indicting and arraigning every day
Something they call a play.

Thus it was only, as it were, by accident, by some

42 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS

lucky adjustment of a subject to the special ability of
a writer, or by the emergence of a genius whose most
careless work was masterly, that flawless specimens of
the romantic style came into existence. The theatres
were open at all seasons, competing with each other for
a public bent on novelty. These conditions of the
stage in London stimulated the fertility, but spoiled
the quality of our drama. The ceremonial festivals at
which the Attic poets twice a year produced their
studied plays before a cultivated people, encouraged the
production of pure monuments of meditated art. The
audience of courtiers and academicians for whom
Racine and Moliere laboured, tolerated only ripe and
polished handiwork. But English stage-wrights lacked
these incentives to elaborate performance. Many
dramas of their manufacture, though they have the
glow of life, the stuff of excellence, must be reckoned
among half-achievements. Many must be said to
justify Ben Jonson's scornful invective: * husks, draff
to drink and swill ' — 'scraps, out of every dish thrown
forth, and raked into the common tub.' The historian
of English literature cannot afford, however, to neglect
even 'things so prostitute.' Their very multitude
impresses the imagination. Their mediocrity helps to
explain the rhythm of dramatic art from a Shakspere's
transcendent inspiration through the meritorious la-
bours of a Massinger, down to the patchwork pieces
of collaborating handicraftsmen. And in the sequel I
shall hope to show that though the conditions of the
London theatre were adverse to the highest perfection
of art, they were helpful to its freedom.

ABSENCE OF STUDIED ART, 43

VIII.

In the Romantic Drama, men of the present age are
struck by want of artistic modulation and gradation,
strangely combined with vigorous conception and
masterly reading of the inmost depths of nature. The
design of a tragedy is often almost puerile in its sim-
plicity. Even Othello falls into lago's trap so stupidly
as to refrigerate our feeling. The transitions from
good to bad, from vice to virtue, from hate to love, in
the same characters are palpably abrupt, almost to our
sense impossible. What Goethe calls the Motiviren of
a situation was neglected ; but the situation itself was
powerfully presented. Bellafront, in Dekker s most
celebrated comedy, begins as a bold and beautiful bad
woman. Love at first sight alters her whole temper,
and she becomes a modest lady. Hipolyto, the man
who wrought this change in her, reflecting on her love-
liness, turns round, and tempts the very woman whom
his earlier persuasions had saved from evil. Under
both aspects, each of these characters is drawn with
admirable force. They maintain their individuality,
although the motives of these complex moral revolu-
tions receive no sufficient development at the artist's
hands. Probably Dekker relied upon the sympathies
of an audience, themselves capable of passionate con-
version ; probably, he felt in his own heart divisions
leading to like violent issues. He did not then appeal
to such as read his drama at the present day, to
scrutinising scholars and critical historians, but to men
and women, still more fitted for sudden spiritual trans-

44 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

formation, still more trembling on the border-line of
good and evil, than are the folk for whom Revival
Meetings and Salvation Armies shout their choruses
and beat their drums in England now. The psycho-
logical excitements of to-day are but a feeble reflex
^ from the stirrings of that epoch. We have to measure
the operation of that drama, not by our blunted sensi-
bilities, but by a far more sensitive, if grosser, instru-
ment of taste. The final significance of the whole
problem of Elizabethan literature lies in one point ; the
people, at that fortunate epoch, vibrated to Shakspere s
delicacy, no less than to the rougher touch of men who
had in them the crudest substance of Shaksperian art
Instead of making the allowances of our 'world-wearied
flesh ' and thought-tormented minds for them, we must
confess that they threw open souls more fresh to
simpler influences.

Nothing is more common in the plays of Massin-
ger and Fletcher than for tyrants to be softened by the
beauty of intended victims, for the tenderest strains
of chivalrous affection to flow from lips which utter
curses and revilings, for passionate love to take the
place of implacable vengeance or brutal cruelty. Are
we to say that these reversions from one temper to
its opposite are unnatural ? They are unnatural now.
Were they unnatural then ? Probably not The critic
therefore must defer to nature as it then existed, nor
let his sense of truth be governed by the evidence
of nature as it now is moulded, for a moment haply,
into forms more firmly set

The dramatists were well acquainted with fixed
types of character, and used these with a crudity which

CONCEPTION OF CHARACTER, 4S

seems no less to shock our apprehension of reality.
No sooner have we excused them for sudden and un-
explained conversions, than we find ourselves compelled
to meet the contrary charge, and defend them from the
crime of well-nigh diabolical consistency. They show
us bad men stubborn in perversity, whom innocence
and beauty and eloquence have no power to charm.
Such are Heywood s Tarquin, Fletchers RoUo. The
Flamineo and Bosola of Webster are villains of yet
darker dye, ruffians whom only Italy could breed,
courtiers refined in arts of wickedness, scholars per-
verted by their studies to defiant atheism, high-livers
tainted with the basest vices, who, broken in repute,
deprived of occupation, sell themselves to great men
to subserve their pleasures and accomplish their re-
venge. In such men, the very refuse of humanity,
there is no faith, no hope, no charity. Some fiend
seems to have sat for their portraits. They are help-
less in the chains of crime ; their ill-deeds binding
them to the bad masters whom they serve, and their
seared consciences allowing them to execute with
coldness devilish designs.

In order to explain such personages and to realise
their action, it was necessary to exhibit horrors incredi-
bly fantastic. Beaumont and Fletcher twice brought
the agonies of death by poison on the stage. Webster
paints a prince murdered by means of an envenomed
helmet, a duchess strangled in her chamber, a sovereign
lady poisoned by the kisses given to her husband's
portrait Ford adds the terror of incestuous passion
to the death-scene of a sister murdered by a brother s
hand. In Massinger's * Virgin Martyr ' a maiden is

46 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

insulted in her honour and driven to the stake. Mar-
ston's Antonio stabs an innocent boy who trusts and
loves him. Hoffmann places on his victim's head a
crown of red-hot iron. A human sacrifice, a father who
kills his son and mutilates himself, a girl whose hands
and tongue have been cut off, together with a score or
so of murders, are exhibited upon the theatre in ' Titus
Andronicus.' It is needless to multiply such details. The
grossness of passion in that age, whether displayed in
brutal and unbridled lust, or in hate, cruelty, and torture,
was more than we can understand. The savagery of
human nature moved by spasms ; its settled barba-
risms, no less than its revulsions and revolts, are now
almost unintelligible. To harmonise and interpret
such humanity in a work of sublime art, taxed all the
powers of even Shakspere. He did this once with
supreme tragic beauty in ' King Lear.' But if the world
should rise against ' King Lear,' and cry, * It is too terri-
ble ! ' — would not the world be justified }

IX.

Insanity was a tragic motive, used frequently by
the romantic playwrights as an instrument for stirring
pity and inspiring dread. To understand it, and to
employ it successfully, was, however, given to few.
The mad humours depicted in Fletcher s * Pilgrim ' and
in Webster's Masque of Lunatics are fantastic appeals
to the vulgar apprehension, rather than scientific studies.
But the interspaces between sanity and frenzy, the
vacillations of the mind upon a brink of horror, the
yieldings of the reason to the fret of passions, have

INSANITY, 47

been seized with masterly correctness — by Massinger
in Sir Giles Overreach, by Fletcher in the love-lunes
of * The Noble Gentleman/ by Ford in Palador s dejec-
tion, by Kyd or his coadjutor in crazy Hieronymo, by
Marston in Andrugio and the disguised Antonio, and
lastly, most effectively, by Webster in his picture of
the Duchess. There is nothing more impressive than
the consciousness of tottering reason in this lady, out-
raged by the company of maniacs and cut-throats.
She argues with herself whether she be really mad or
not:

0 that it were possible

To hold some two days* conference with the dead !
From them I should leam somewhat I am sure

1 never shall know here. I '11 tell you a miracle :
I am not mad yet to my cause of sorrow ;

The heavens o'er my head seem made of molten brass,

The earth of flaming sulphur ; yet I am not mad.

I am acquainted with sad misery,

As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar :

Necessity makes me suffer constantly,

And custom makes it easy.

Extravagant passions, the love of love, the hate of hate,
the spasms of indulged revenge, drive men to the verge
of delirium. This state of exaltation, when the whole
nature quivers beneath the weight of overpowering re-
pulsion or desire, was admirably rendered even by men
who could not seize the accent of pronounced insanity.
Ferdinand, in the same tragedy by Webster, kills his
sister from excess of jealousy and avarice. When he
sees her corpse, his fancy, set on flame already by the
fury of his hate, becomes a hell, which burns the
image of her calm pale forehead, fixed eyes, and
womanhood undone in years of beauty, on his reeling

4S SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

brain. * Cover her face : mine eyes dazzle : she died
young.' There is no place for repentance in his soul ;
he flies from the room a raving and incurable lunatic
Milder and more pathetic forms of distraction, resulting
from loss, ill-treatment, slighted love, are handled no
less skilfully. The settled melancholy of poor Penthea
in Ford's ' Broken Heart' is not less touching than the
sorrows of Ophelia. For realistic studies of mad-
houses we may go to Middleton and Dekker ; for the
lunacy of witchcraft to Rowley ; for the ludicrous as-
pects of idiocy to Jonson's Troubleall. To taste the
sublime of terror we must turn the pages of ' King
Lear,' or watch Lady Macbeth in her somnambulism.
It is clear that all the types of mental aberration, from
the fixed conditions of dementia and monomania
through temporary delirium to crack-brained imbecility,
were familiar objects to our dramatists. They formed
common and striking ingredients in the rough life of
that epoch.

Emerging from the Middle Ages, the men of the
sixteenth century carried with them a heavy burden of
still haunting spiritual horrors. As Queen Elizabeth's
Prayer Book was illustrated upon the margin with a
Danse Macabre, so these playwrights etched their
scenes with sinister imaginings of death. They gazed
with dread and fascination on the unfamiliar grave.
The other world had for them intense reality ; and
they invested it with terrors of various and vivid kinds.
Sometimes it is described as a place of solitude —

M EDIT A TIONS ON DEA TH. 49

Of endless parting
With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,
With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason !
For in the silentjgrave no^conversation,
No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,
No careful father's counsel ; nothing 's heard,
Nor nothing is, but all obHvion,
Dust, and an endless darkness.

Again, it is peopled with hideous shapes and fiends
that plagued the wicked. ' 'T is full of fearful shadows,'
says the king in * Thierry and Theodoret.' Claudio, in
his agony, exclaims :

Ay, but to die and go we know not where ;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod, and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice ;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence about

The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts

Imagine howling : 't is too horrible !

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Hamlet, meddling with the casuistry of suicide, is still
more terror-striking by one simple word :

To die — to sleep ; —
To sleep ! perchance to dream : ay, there *s the rub ;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

The medieval preoccupation with the world beyond
this world, surviving in the Renaissance, led these

so SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

musicians to play upon the organ-stops of death in
plangent minor keys. Instead of dread, they some-
times use the tone of weariness :

All life is but a wandering to find home ;

WTien we are gone, we 're there. Happy were man,

Could here his voyage end ; he should not then

Answer, how well or ill he steered his soul

By heaven's or by hell's compass.

Milder contemplations, when death seems not merely
acceptable as an escape from life, but in itself desirable,
relieve the sternness of the picture :

'T is of all sleeps the sweetest :
Children begin it to us, strong men seek it,
And kings from height of all their painted glory
Fall like spent exhalations to this centre.

Why should the soul of man dread death ?

These fears
Feeling but once the fires of noble thought
Fly like the shapes of clouds we form to nothing.

What, after all, is it to die ?

'T is less than to be born ; a lasting sleep ;

A quiet resting from all jealousy ;

A thing we all pursue ; I know, besides,

It is but giving over of a game

That must be lost

Memnon, in the * Mad Lovers Tragedy,' reasoning
upon his hopeless passion for the princess, argues thus:

I do her wrong, much wrong : she 's young and blessed,
Sweet as the spring, and as his blossoms tender ;
And I a nipping north-wind, my head hung
With hails and frosty icicles : are the souls so too
When we depart hence, lame, and old, and loveless ?
No, sure 't is ever youth there ; time and death
Follow our flesh no more ; and that forced opinion
That spirits have no sexes, I believe not.

MEDITATIONS ON DEATIt, Jt

Where, asks his friend, may pure iove hope for its
accomplishment ?

Below, Siphax,
Below us, in the other world, Elysium,
Where 's no more dying, no despairing, mourning,
Where all desires are full, deserts down-loaden.
There, Siphax, there, where loves are ever living.

In the same strain of ex&lted feeling, but with a
touch of even sweeter pathos, Caratach comforts his
little nephew Hengo, at the hour of death. The boy
is shuddering on the brink of that dark river : * Whither
must we go when we are dead ? '

^\lly, to the blessedest place, boy ! Ever sweetness

And happiness dwells there.

No ill men,

That live by violence and strong oppression,

Come thither. T is for those the gods love — good ones.

Webster, contrasting the death of those who die in
peace with that of tyrants and bad livers, makes a
prince exclaim :

O thou soft, natural death, that art joint twin
To sweetest slumber ! No rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure : the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement ; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion ; pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

Dekker too, in his most melodious verse, has said :

An innocent to die ; what is it less

But to add angels to heaven's happiness ?

It will be observed that the purely theological note is
never sounded in any of these lyrical outpourings on
the theme of death. The pagan tone which marks
them all, takes strongest pitch, where it is well in

E 2

52 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

keeping with dramatic character, in the last words of
Petronius condemned to suicide by Nero :

It is indeed the last and end of ills I

The gods, before they would let us taste death's joys,

Placed us i' the toil and sorrows of this world.

Because we should perceive the amends and thank them.

Death, the grim knave, but leads you to the door

Where, entered once, all curious pleasures come

To meet and welcome you.

A troop of beauteous ladies, from whose eyes

Tx)ve thousand arrows, thousand graces shoots.

Puts forth their fair hands to you and invites

To their green arbours and close- shadowed walks.

Whence banished is the roughness of our years !

Only the west wind blows ; it *s ever spring

And ever summer. There the laden boughs

Offer their tempting burdens to your hand.

Doubtful your eye or taste inviting more.

There every man his own desires enjoys ;

Fair Lucrece lies by lusty Tarquin's side.

And woos him now again to ravish her.

Nor us, though Roman, Lais will refuse ;

To Corinth any man may go. . . .

Mingled with that fair company, shall we

On banks of violets and of hyacinths

Of loves devising sit, and gently sport ;

And all the while melodious music hear,

And poets' songs that music far exceed,

The old Anacreon crowned with smiling flowers,

And amorous Sapho on her I>esbian lute

Beauty's sweet scars and Cupid's godhead sing.

After this rapturous foretaste of Elysium, he turns to
his friend :

Hither you must, and leave your purchased houses.
Your new-made garden and your black-browed wife.
And of the trees thou hast so quaintly set,
Not one but the displeasant cypress shall
Go with thee.

PAGAN TONE. 53

To his mistress :

Each best day of our life at first doth go,
To them succeeds diseased age and woe ;
Now die your pleasures, and the days you pray
Your rhymes and loves and jests will take away.
Therefore, my sweet, yet thou wilt go with me,
And not live here to what thou wouldst not see.

She not unnaturally shrinks from suicide. Her lover
urges :

Yet know you not that any being dead
Repented them, and would have lived again ?
They then their errors saw and foolish prayers ;
But you are blinded in the love of life.
Death is but sweet to them that do approach it.
To me, as one that taken with Delphic rage.
When the divining God his breast doth fill,
He sees what others cannot standing by,
It seems a beauteous and pleasant thing.

Nero's meditations upon death, in the same tragedy,
conjure up a companion picture of Tartarus :

O must I die, must now my senses close ?
For ever die, and ne'er return again.
Never more see the sun, nor heaven, nor earth ?
Whither go I ? What shall I be anon ?
What horrid journey wanderest thou, my soul,
Under the earth in dark, damp, dusky vaults ?

Phlegethon and Styx toss their hoarse waves before
him ; the Furies shake their whips and twisted snakes :

And my own furies far more mad than they.

My mother and those troops of slaughtered friends.

54 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

XI.

The eternal nature of both happiness and misery,
the presence of heaven or hell within the soul of man,
irrespective of creeds and dogmas, were pictured with
the force of men who felt the spiritual reality of life
keenly. Marlowe makes Faustus ask the devil Mephis-
tophilis where hell is :

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it :
Think'st thou that 1, who saw the face of Grod,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tomiented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting life ?

Dreadful was the path to death for those who died
in sin. Webster's Flamineo cries to his murderous
enemies :

Oh, the way 's dark and horrid ! I cannot see.
Shall I have no company ?

They reply :

Yes, thy sins
Do run before thee, to fetch fire from hell
To light thee thither.

With the same ghastly energy his sister utters a like
thought of terror :

My soul, like to a ship in a black storm.
Is driven, I know not whither.

Yet the dauntless courage and strong nerves of these
' glorious villains ' sustained them to the last :

We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Yea, cease to die, by dying.

MEDITATIONS ON LIFE, 55

So they speak, when the game of life has been played
out ; and then, like travellers,

Go to discover countries yet unknown.

Ask of such men, what is life ?

It is a tale told by an idiot,

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Ask, what are men ?

We are merely the stars' tennis balls,
Struck and banded which way please them.

To be man
Is but to be the exercise of cares
In several shapes ; as miseries do grow
They alter as men's forms ; but none know how.

' The world's a tedious theatre,' says one. Another
cries :

Can man by no means creep out of himself,
And leave the slough of viperous grief behind ?

It is a pleasure to collect these utterances on life
and death, so pointed and so passionate, so pregnant
with deep thought and poignant with heartfelt emotion.
It must, however, be remembered, that they are dramatic
sayings, put into the lips of scenic personages. To
take them as the outcry from their authors ' own expe-
rience would be uncritical, Yet the frequency of their
occurrence indicates one well-marked quality of our
drama. That is the sombre cast of Melancholy, deep
Teutonic meditative Melancholy, which drapes it with
a tragic pall. When Marston invites his audience to a
performance of * Antonio's Revenge,' he not only relies
upon this mood in the spectators, but he paints it with
the exultation of one to whom it is familiar and dear.

/. S//AK'SPERE\S PREDECESSORS.

Listen to the muffled discords of the opening lines, and
to the emergence of the spirit shaking melody !

I'hc rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps
'I'hc fluent summer's vein ; and drizzling sleet
Chilieth the wan bleak cheek of the numbed earth ;
Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves
PVom the naked shuddering branch, and pills the skin
From off the soft and delicate aspects.
O now, mcthinks, a sullen tragic scene
Would suit the time with pleasing congruence I

Therefore, we proclaim,
If any spirit breathes within this round
Uncapable of weighty passion —
As from his birth being hugged in the arms
And nuzzled 'twixt the breasts of happiness —
Who winks and shuts his apprehension up
I*'rom common sense of what men were and are.
Who would not know what man must be — let such
Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows :
We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast
Nailed to the earth with grief, if any heart
Pierced through with anguish, pant within this ring.
If there be any blood whose heat is choked
And stifled with true sense of misery,
If aught of these strains fill this consort up.
They arrive most welcome.

* Nothing's so dainty-sweet as lovely Melancholy,' ex-
claims Beaumont in the Ode which tells of :

Folded arms and fixtjd eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,
A look that 's fastened on the ground,
A tongue chained up without a sound :
Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves :
Moonlight walks where all the fowls
Are warmly housed, save bats and owls.

This habitual Melancholy assumed many shapes. Fan-
tastic in Vendice apostrophising his dead lady's skull :

MELANCHOLY, 57

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee ? For thee does she undo herself ? . . .
Thou may St lie chaste now ! it were fine, methinks,
To have thee seen at revels, forgetful feasts.
And unclean brothels.

Tender in Palador s bewilderment :

Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him !
For he is like to something I remember
A great while since, a long long time ago.

Exquisite in the Dirge for Chrysostom :

Sleep, poor youth, sleep in peace.
Relieved from love and mortal care ;

Whilst we, that pine in life's disease.
Uncertain-blessed, less happy are.

Close to this melancholy, is religion. Though rarely

touched on by our playwrights, the cardinal points of

Christian doctrine were present to their minds ; and

when they struck that chord of piety, it was with a

direct and manly hand :

The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer ;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed

This is no conventional portrait of the Founder of our
faith. Nor are these solemn words, in which an injured
husband absolves his penitent and dying wife, spoken
from the lips merely :

As freely from the low depths of my soul

As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,

I pardon thee.

Even as I hope for pardon at that day

When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,

So be thou pardoned

58 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

XII.

If the anguish of the world was painted forcibly in
all its strength and ugliness by our old dramatists, the
beauty and the peace, the calm of quiet places, the
loveliness of nature and the dignity of soul which make
man's life worth living, were no less faithfully delineated.
If they doted upon the grave, spending night-hours in
sombre contemplations, they could throw the windows
of the heart wide open upon bright May mornings,
hear the lark's song, and feel the freshness and the joy
of simple things. It was the chief triumph of the
Romantic style to make these transitions from grave to
gay, from earnest to sprightly, without effort and with-
out discord. The multiform existence men enjoy upon
this planet received a full reflection in our theatre ; nor
was one of its many aspects neglected for another.
Those artists verily believed that * the world's a stage ; '
and they made their art a microcosm of the universe.
It was given to all of them, in greater or less degree,
to weave the wonder-web of human joys and pains, to
sound the depths and search the heights of nature,
modulating with unconscious felicity from key to key,
blending bright hues and sad in harmony upon their
arras- work. Shakspere's pre-eminence consists chiefly in
this, that he did supremely well what all were doing.
His touch on life was so unerringly true that the most
diverse objects took shape and place together naturally
in his atmosphere of art ; even as in the full rich sun-
light of a summer afternoon the many-moving crowds,

FEMALE CHARACTERS. 59

the river, bridges, buildings, parks, and domes of a great
city stand distinct but harmonised.

No theatre is so rich in countless and contrasted
types of womanhood. Shakspere's women have passed
into a proverb. But I need not, nay seek not, to draw
illustrations from his works. It is rather my object
here as elsewhere, to show how the ' star-ypointing
pyramid ' on which the sovran poet dwells enthroned,
was built by lesser men of like capacity. It has been
said that the very names of Fletchers ladies have
a charm : Aspasia, Ordella, Amoret, Evadne, Viola,
Euphrasia, Edith, Oriana ; and their characters answer
to the music of their names. They are sweet, true,
gentle; enduring all things, believing all things ; patient,
meek, strong, innocent, unto the end. His Bonduca
marks another type — the Amazon, the Queen, rebellious
against Rome. Such women the old playwrights loved ;
and they often interwove a thread of virile boldness or
bravado with the portraiture. Marston's Sophonisba, the
Carthaginian bride, who meets death with a dauntless
countenance ; Massinger s Domitia, the Roman em-
press, wooing an actor to her love in words that savour
of habitual command ; Ford's Annabella, guilty in her
passion beyond thought or language, but sublime in her
endurance of disgrace and death ; Marston's Insatiate
Countess ; Dekker s Bellafront, are all of the same
stamp, masculine for good or evil, and of indomitable
will. The type reaches its climax in Vittoria Corom-
bona, whose insolence and intellectual ascendency,
when she stands up to defy her judges and confound
them with her beauty, blaze still upon us with the
splendour of an ominous star. That the same poets

6o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

could draw the softer lines of female character, is proved
by Mellida, by Dorothea, by Isabella, in whom the
tenderness of woman mingles with heroic constancy
and strength in suffering. Nor was it only from the
regions of romance and story that they borrowed types
so varied. Contemporary English life supplied them
with Alice Arden and Anne Frankford, with Winnifrede
and Susan Carter, with Lady Ager and with Mrs. Win-
cott — mere names, perhaps, to the majority of those who
meet them here ; but women with whose passionate
or pathetic histories I may perchance acquaint my
readers.

How could such characters — not to speak of Imogen
or Cleopatra, Constance or Katharine — have been re-
presented on the English stage } During the reigns
of Elizabeth and James no women acted. Boys were
trained to take their parts ; and the youth who played
Lady Macbeth or the Duchess of Malfi shaved his
beard before he placed the coronet and curls upon his
head. Here is indeed a mystery. With all the
advantages offered to the modern dramatist by the
greatest actresses, it is but rarely that he moulds a
perfect woman for the stage. How could Shakspere
have committed Desdemona to a boy } How had
Fletcher the heart to shadow forth those half-tones
and those evanescent hues in his Aspasia }

In consequence, perhaps, of this custom, great
coarseness in the treatment of dramatic subjects was
allowed. Boys uttered speeches which the English
moral sense, even of that age, would scarcely have
tolerated in the mouths of women. Much of the
obscenity which defiles the comic drama may possibly

BOY- ACTORS, 6i

be attributed to this practice.^ Yet it is certain that the
boy-actors acquired considerable skill in rendering even
the finer shades of character. Prince Arthur in * King
John' and Hengo in *Bonduca' prove that some even
of the male parts assigned to them involved a delicate
perception of the subdest sentiments. Often, oo, when
they appeared as women, they assumed a masculine
disguise, and carried on a double part with innuendoes,
hints, and half-betrayals of their simulated sex. The
pages in * Philaster ' and * The Lover s Melancholy,'
Viola in * Twelfth Night,' and Jonson s * Silent
Woman,* are instances of these epicene characters,
which our ancestors delighted to contemplate. * What
an odd double confusion it must have made,' says
Charles Lamb, * to see a boy play a woman playing a
man : we cannot disentangle the perplexity without
some violence to the imagination.' Yet there is no
violence in the presentation. When the boy who
played Euphrasia, under the disguise of Bellario, is
wounded, and breathes out these words to Philaster —

My life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts ! 't is not a life,
T is but a piece of childhood thrown away ! —

who but feels the woman speaking } The poet heard
her speak ; and what he heard, he has conveyed to us.

' The female actors of Italy and France, where comedy was certainly
more grossly indecent, warn us to be cautious on this point. But, taking
the greater soundness of English moral feeling into account, I think that
the attempt to introduce women into the theatrical profession would
probably have ended in an earlier suppression of the stage.

62 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

XIII.

While Tragedy reveals the deeper qualities of an
epoch — the essential passions, aspirations, intuitions of a
people — Comedy displays the humours, habits, foibles,
superficial aspects of society. It is not easy to make
an exhaustive classification of the many forms of
Comedy exhibited by our Romantic Drama. Yet
these may be broadly divided into two main species :
Comedies of Life and Comedies of Imagination. The
Comedies of Life subdivide into Comedies of Character,
exemplified in the best work of Jonson and Massinger ;
and Comedies of Manners, abundantly illustrated by all
the minor playwrights. Shakspere can hardly be said
to have produced a Comedy of Character, in the sense
in which we give this name to Jonson s * Alchemist* or
Moli^re*s * Tartufe ; ' for though no dramatist peopled
the comic stage with a greater number of finely dis-
criminated and perfectly realised types of character, yet
we cannot say that any of his so-called comedies were
written to exemplify a leading moral quality. Nor
again, with the single exception of the * Merry Wives of
Windsor,' did he give the world a Comedy of Manners
in the strict sense of that phrase. Where Shakspere
ruled supreme was, in the Comedy of the Imagination.
This, in truth, was his invention ; as it is the rarest and
most characteristic flower of the Romantic Drama.

To call * The Merchant of Venice,' ' The Tempest,'
* As You Like It,* and * Measure for Measure' by the
name we give to plays of Terence, Moliere, Jonson,
is clearly a mistake in criticism. The Shaksperian

ROMANTIC COATED Y, 63

Comedies of the Imagination carry us into a world of
pure Romance, where men and women move in the
ethereal atmosphere of fancy. They have lost none of
their reality as human beings. But their vices and
their follies exact a milder censure than in actual life ;
their actions and their passions have a grace and charm
beyond the lot of common mortals. Strictly speaking,
the Romantic Tragedy and the Romantic Comedy of
Shakspere present the same material, the same philo-
sophy, the same conception of existence, under different
lights and with a different tone of sympathy.^ How
Shakspere meant his Comedies to be interpreted, may
be gathered from the induction to * The Taming of
the Shrew,' from the title of ' A Midsummer Night's
Dream,' from the magic of Prospero, and from the
woodland solitudes of Arden. In these creations he
avoids the ordinary ways of social life, chooses fantas-
tic fables, or touches tales of Italy with an enchanter's
wand. Lyly in his Court Comedies had preceded
Shakspere on this path of art, and Fletcher followed
him, although at a wide interval. After defining Shak-
spere's Comedy as the Comedy of pure Imagination and
Romantic incident, in which the masters unrivalled
character-drawing was displayed with no less strength,
but to less awful purpose, than in his Tragedy ; we may
divide the comedies of Fletcher into two main classes,
describing the one class by the name of Romantic

' Mercutio, for example, in Romeo and Juliet is a comic character,
and Angelo in Measure for Measure is deeply tragic. The part of
Shylock is a tragic episode within a comedy; the part of Imogen is hardly
less tragic than that of Cordelia, except in the conclusion of the plot.
See Professor Ward's History for some excellent critical observations
upon this point.

64 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Lustspiel, or Play of Fanciful Amusement, the other
by that of Romantic Comedy of Intrigue. In the former
of these species, represented by * The Pilgrim,' * The
Sea Voyage/ and * The Island Princess,' Fletcher
handles romantic incident with something of Shak-
sperian grace. In the latter, including * The Wild-
Goose Chace,' * The Spanish Curate,' and * The
Chances,' he follows the French and Spanish manner.
The remote scenes in which Fletcher laid the action
of his plays, the fluency of thought, fertility of inven-
tion, and exquisite poetic ease with which he wrought
and carried out his complicated plots, raise both types
of comedy above a common level, and give them the
right to rank at no immeasurable distance below Shak-
spere's. Perusing these light and airy improvisations,
our fancy is continually charmed and our attention
fascinated. But when we reflect upon their characters,
we are forced to regard these men and women as the
figures of a pantomime, the creatures of a poet's reverie,
who, doing right or wrong, are moved by springs of
wayward impulse, and who feel no moral responsibilities
like those of daily life. It is just here that Fletcher's
inferiority to Shakspere in the Comedy of the Imagina-
tion is most strongly felt. While his Romantic Lust-
spiel reveals the outward show of things, and plays
upon the superficies of human nature, Shakspere's un-
folds the very soul of man made magically perfect, and
his imagination freed from all impediments to its aerial
flight. Sir Thomas Browne has said, * We are some-
what more than ourselves in our sleep ; ' and these
words might be applied to Shakspere's comedies.
There we move in a land of dreams, peopled by shapes

HYBRID COMEDY, 65

brighter and more beautiful than those of this gross
earth, lighted by larger suns that shine through softer
air.

Besides Comedies of Imagination and Romantic
Intrigue, the fancy of the minor dramatists ran riot
in many other hybrid species. They interwove the
Italian Pastoral with classic legend or with transcripts
from English rural life, invented graceful allegories like
Dekker s * Fortunatus,' or Day's * Parliament of Bees,'
and adapted motives of the Masque at Court to the
legitimate Drama. It would not serve a useful pur-
pose to pursue this analysis further. It is enough to
indicate how large a part Imagination and Romantic
Fancy played in English comic art.

What is now known as Farce was not a common
form of Comedy in the Elizabethan age. The custom
of the theatre demanded five-act pieces ; and though
many plots are essentially farcical, the method of con-
ducting them necessitated by so large a scale of treat-
ment, altered their dramatic quality. ' Gammer Gur-
ton's Needle' and Ben Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair'
may be mentioned, however, as strictly farcical composi-
tions. The ' Silent Woman,' again, is rather a Titanic
Farce than a true Comedy of Character or Manners

In plays belonging to the Comedy of Manners we
gain faithful studies of daily life in London. Their
realism makes them valuable ; but the majority are
coarse, and not a little tedious to read. The stock per-
sonages resemble those of Latin Comedy — a jealous
husband, a wilful wife, a stupid country squire, a para-
site, a humorous serving-man, a supple courtier, a
simple girl, an apish Frenchman, a whining Puritan,

66 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

a woman of the town, a gallant, a swaggering bully, a
conceited coxcomb. The playwrights, when engaged
upon such pieces, sought success by movement, broad
fun, lively dialogue, good-humoured satire, and roughly
outlined silhouettes of character. They threw them
off rapidly, and took no care to preserve them for
posterity. Marston in his preface to the * Fawne '
apologises for its publication : * If any shall wonder
why I print a comedy, whose life rests much in the
actor s voice, let such know that I cannot avoid pub-
lishing.' He here alludes to the booksellers' practice
of having plays taken down by shorthand, and so pre-
senting them for sale in a pirated and garbled state.
Marston makes a similar defence for the * Malcontent : '
' Only one thing affects me, to think that scenes
invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively
published to be read.' So truly did * the life of these
things consist in action,' that passages were often left
for the extempore declamation of the actors. Some-
times the whole conduct of the piece depended on
their powers of improvisation. They were then pro-
vided with programmes of the acts and scenes, and of
the entrances and exits of the several persons. These
programmes received the name of * Piatt ' or chart,
from which we probably derive the word * plot' They
were hung up on the screen-work of the stage for
reference and study. In Italy such outlines of come-
dies were called * Scenario.'

In reading the ordinary Comedy of Manners, all
these circumstances must be taken into consideration.
We must remember that the effect of such plays, even
where written, depended on the actors, who were

COMEDY OF MANNERS. 67

trained more strictly to their business then than now.
The old custom of maintaining jesters in castles and at
Court bred a class of men whose profession it was to
entertain an audience with mimicry, ludicrous tricks,
and sharp sayings. Continued through centuries, the
skill of these jesters reached a high degree of excel-
lence, through the tradition of buffoonery established,
and through the emulation which impelled each Fool of
eminence to surpass his predecessors. The celebrity
of Tarleton, Green, Summer, Kempe, and Robert
Wilson, proves that the comic playwrights could rely
upon an able band of interpreters. It may even be
asserted that the popular talents of these jesters
proved an obstacle to the development of higher
Comedy in England, by accustoming the public taste
to jigs and merriments, solo pieces and inventions of
the clown, instead of encouraging a demand for
seriously studied art.

Dekker and Massinger, Middleton and Shirley,
claim notice among the minor playwrights who digni-
fied the Comedy of Manners by solid and thoughtful
workmanship. But it was from Jonson that this
species received the most masterly handling. His
comedies in their way, as truly as those of Shakspere,'
are the productions of indubitable and peculiar genius.
He never wrote at random. He never sought to
please the populace by exhibitions of mere shallow
merriment ; nor did he always succeed in riveting their
attention by the ponderous stage-antics of his * learned
sock.' Those who would not worship his Muse were
treated by him with contempt. He pursued his own

F 2

68 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

designs, penning satiric dramas on his fellow-craftsmen,
and pouring scorn upon

The loathfed stage
And the more loathsome age,
Where pride and impudence in faction knit
Usurp the chair of wit

Jonson was a moralist and a philosopher, conveying
through the medium of his comedy the results of
mature studies and of patient inquiries into human
nature. The end of poetry, in his opinion, was *to
inform men in the best reason of living ; ' and he wrote
systematically, deducing characters from fixed concep-
tions of specific attributes, building up plots with all
the massive machinery of learning and potent intel-
lectual materials at his command. Unlike the poets of
Imaginative Comedy, he adhered to scenes of common
human experience ; and, deviating from the traditions
of the school he had adopted, he portrayed unusual
and exaggerated eccentricities (* Volpone * and * The
Alchemist '), instead of the broader and more general
aspects of humanity. Therefore the name of Humour,
which recurs so often in his work, may be taken as the
keynote to his conception of character.

XIV.

-^ Criticism has to separate the transient from the
permanent ; to attempt at least to estimate the true

\ relations of the subject which it treats. Therefore, in
this preliminary survey of Elizabethan Drama, we are
led to ask some questions of more general import than
those which have as yet concerned us. What were

PERMANENT VALUE OF THE DRAMA, 69

the causes of its eminent success ? Why did it sink so
soon into obhvion ? What formative influence has it
exercised over our literature and over that of other
nations — the modern German and the recent French,
for instance ? What place shall we assign to it among
the lastingly important products of the human genius ?
In other words : Were these plays, the majority of
which seem to most of us so dull and dead now, at
any time endowed with life and power over men ? Did
they educate the English people, and help to make
this nation what it is ?

These are the weightiest questions belonging to
the subject ; more grave than the settling of dates or
dubious readings ; less easy to resolve than inquiries
into the antiquities of theatres. To some of them I
gave a partial answer when I tried to show how our
Drama embodied the spirit of the sixteenth century in
England ; for if it did this, as undoubtedly it did, then
upon this account alone we have to place it on the list
of world-important products. Epics that condense suc-
cessive epochs for us in monumental poems, Dramas
that present the spirit of past periods in a series of
lively shadow-pictures, will always rank among the
most valuable and permanently interesting achieve-
ments of literature. But it is not enough to feel cer-
tain that the playwrights worked in close dependence
on the spirit of their age, and gave its thoughts and
passions utterance. It is not enough to demonstrate
their value for students bent on seizing points of local
colour, or for historians engaged in penetrating the
past workings of the hum.an mind. We want, further,
to estimate their capacity for expressing, their influence

70 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in forming, national character. In order to do this,
we must resume some points already partly entertained.

XV.

Three things may never be forgotten in the
criticism of our Drama. First, it grew up beneath
the patronage of the whole nation ; the public to
which these playwrights appealed was the English
people, from Elizabeth upon the throne down to the
lowest ragamuffin of the streets ; in the same wooden
theatres met lords and ladies, citizens and prentices,
common porters and working men, soldiers, sailors,
pickpockets, and country folk. Secondly, the English
during the period of its development exhibited no
aptitude in any marked degree for any other of the
arts. Thirdly, it was hampered in its freedom neither
by the scholastic pedantry of literary men, nor by the
political or ecclesiastical restraints of Government.
These points are so important that I shall enlarge
upon each separately.

XVL

The Drama, more than any other form of art,
requires a national public. Unless it live in sympathy
with the whole people at a certain moment of inten-
sified vitality, it cannot flourish or become more than
a merely literary product. That complete sympathy
between the playwrights and the nation which existed
in England, was wanting in Italy, France, and Spain.
Italy had no common sense of nationality, no centre of

THREE MAIN POINTS, 71

national existence. Each little state worked for its
own interests, maintained its own traditions and its
own political diplomacy. Among them all, no single
Athens, with indubitable intellectual pre-eminence,
arose to make a focus for Italian arts and sciences.
Florence more nearly fulfilled this part than any other
town of the peninsula. But Florence was not an
imperial city, like Athens in the age of Pericles ; and
Florence had no power to create for Italy that public
which is necessary to the full perfection of the Drama.
A strong national spirit animated France and Spain.
These two countries, next to England, produced the
finest dramatic literatures of modern times. Yet in
Spain the galling fetters of Court etiquette and of
ecclesiastical intolerance checked the evolution of the
popular genius ; while in France, between the poet
and the people intervened academies and aristocracy.
It is not worth our while to speak of Germany. At
the close of the last century some German poets strove
to found a theatre. But Goethe complained bitterly
that the nation had no central point, no brain, no heart,
to which he could appeal.^

XVII.

While the artistic energies of Italy were principally
employed in giving figurative form to ideas, England
had no native or imp6rted art Architecture had just
ceased to exist as an original growth in our island.

* For further development of this theme, see the essay on * Euripides '
in my Studies of Greek PoefSy and the chapter on * Italian Drama' in my
Renaissance in Italy ^ vol. v.

72 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Instead of seeking plastic expression for their percep-
tion of the beautiful, our artists studied poetical form.
They laboured to present an image to the mind, and
knew not how to captivate the senses. Holbein, our
only great naturalised painter, produced little else but
portraits. Torrigiano, a second-rate sculptor, visited
these barbarous shores to make his fortune, and
decamped again. No foreign masters settled here
and founded schools ; for the fairest promise could not
lure a Florentine beyond Paris ; England was to men
of Southern race what Siberia is to us, and Paris
like S. Petersburg. Thus the power of the English
intellect was driven in upon itself for nutriment.
Poets had to find the world of beauty in their
thoughts, in the study of mankind, in dreams of the
imagination. This gave a human depth and rich
. intensity to their dramatic writing. It encouraged
the playwrights to penetrate the deepest and the
subtlest labyrinths of passion, and forced them to
express themselves through language, for want of
any other medium. But it also impressed a certain
homeliness, a well-marked stamp of insularity, upon
their work.

A contemporary critic compares the * genius ' of
the English race with French * openness of mind and
flexibility of intelligence,' defining genius for his pur-
pose as * mainly an affair of energy.' The literature of
the Elizabethan age, he tells us, is a * literature of
genius/ complaining of the poverty of its results, and
pointing to the power and fecundity of the French
* literature of intelligence ' in the * great century ' of the
Grand Monarque. We may welcome the wholesome

ADEQUACY TO THE NATION. 73

rebuke to national vanity contained in these remarks ;
and may note the circumspection with which Mr. M.
Arnold guards himself against doing obvious injustice
to the English type of literary excellence.^ Yet there
remains the stubborn fact that a * literature of genius '
is rarer and more luminous, though less imitable and
less adapted to average utilities, than a * literature of
intelligence.* The question really is, which sort of
literature the world would the more willingly let die, in
the comfortable assurance that by industry and self-
control it could at any time recover it. Most men, I
think, would answer this question by saying that a
literature *of genius,' evolved under conditions so
exceptional as that of England in the sixteenth
century, is more irrecoverable and less likely to be
reproduced, even though more wayward, insular, and
incoherent, than a literature of 'openness of mind;'
and that therefore this literature is quite incalcu-
lably more valuable. All nations, including even the
English, have recently made considerable progress

^ It seems to me a critical mistake to call genius ^ mainly an affair of
energy.' The genius of such a poet as Shakspere implies certainly more
creative energy than his critics and admirers have. But we rate this genius
so highly as we do for far other qualities ; for finer moral and intellectual
penetration than is given to merely energetic personalities, for sensibility
to the rarest natural influences, for a diviner intelligence of secrets and a
more god-like openness of mind to the world's utmost loveliness than
fell to the lot of, for example, Voltaire. It is for these high gifts, not
for its energy, that we value the genius of Shakspere. And if we turn to
science ; is it for energy that we value Newton or Darwin ? Surely we
value Whewell for energy; but Newton or Darwin for exceptionally
potent sympathy with truths implicit in things subject to the human mind.
Energy, indeed, is needed to pursue these truths to their last hiding-
place, and to produce them for the common mind of man. But energy
alone is the mere muscle of genius, the thews and sinews of an organism
differentiated by its delicacy and its power of divination.

74 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in the acquisition of a sound prose style, in the
vulgarisation of philosophical thought, and in the
polite treatment of a variety of useful topics. But
which of all the nations has produced a literature of
genius ?

Our Drama remains the monument of peculiar
mental power ; eccentric and unequal ; full of poetry
and thought, but deficient in neatness and moderation ;
with more of matter than of polish, of Pan than of
Apollo ; rough where the French is smooth, fiery
where the French glitters, rude where the French is
elegant ; sublime, imaginative, passionate, where Gallic
art is graceful, prosaic, rhetorical, and superficial.

It would be difficult for an impartial critic to accuse
Elizabethan literature of inherent barrenness and poor
results. The civil wars, indeed, suspended the a^sthe-
tical development of Englishmen. A sect averse to
arts and letters triumphed, and were followed by a
dissolute half-foreign reign. Political and religious
interests, more grave than those of art, consigned
the dramatists and poets of the sixteenth century
to oblivion for a time. A new taste in literature
succeeded, ran its course, and dwindled in a century
to decadence, after powerfully influencing the develop-
ment of English thought and style. But the spirit of
the Elizabethan age has revived in this age of Victoria.
The memory of those poets, like the memory of youth
and spring, is now an element of beauty in the mental
life of a people too much given to worldly interests.
The blossoms, too, of that spring-time of poetry, un-
like the pleasures of youth or the flowers of May, are
imperishable.

FREEDOM FROM RESTRAINTS, 75

We need only peruse the Fourth Book of the *
' Golden Treasury/ and take mental stock of the four or
five great living poets of our race, in order to perceive
in how deep and true a sense English poetry, by far
the richest, most varied, sweetest, and most powerful
vein of poetry in modern Europe, is still sympathetic
to the poetry of the sixteenth century. I care to say
nothing here about the influence of Elizabethan Eng-
lish Literature over the recent Literatures of Germany,
France, and other nations.

XVI I L

The English Drama enjoyed singular advantages
of freedom from cramping restraints, whether imposed
by educated opinion or by a cautious Government. The
playivrights and the public were unfastidious and un-
critical. While the wits of Italy apologised for making
use of their mother tongue, absorbed their energies in
scholarship, bowed to the verdict of coteries, and set
the height of style in studied imitation of the Romans,
our poets wrote *as love dictates,' consulted no authority
but nature, and appealed to no standard but popular
approbation. Literature sprang up in England when
the labour of restoring the classics had already been
achieved, and when the superstitious veneration for
antiquity had begun to abate. Men of learning were not
the national poets of England, as they were of Italy ; nor
did the universities give laws of taste to the people.
Our poets were not scholars in the strict sense of that
term ; or if scholars, they were renegades from Alma

76 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Mater, preferring London to Oxford or Cambridge,
the theatre to the lecture-room, Bandello and Spanish
Comedies to Seneca and treatises on the Poetics.
There existed no tyrannous Academy, like that before
whose verdict Corneille had to bow, when RicheHeu
condemned the Cid for violating rules of art.

On the other hand, the dramatists were almost
equally unfettered by authority. To write what they
chose so long as they did not blaspheme against
religion, libel the Government, or grossly corrupt public
morality, was the privilege secured to them by royal
letters patent. This liberty would have been impos-
sible in any one of the small jealous states of Italy.
It would have been impossible in any country where
the Holy Office held sway, or where the Church was
independent of the State.

It might be urged that though exemption from
political and ecclesiastical interference was an advan-
tage to our theatre, some subordination to learned
taste would have been salutary. This argument
cannot, however, be maintained in the face of what is
known about the influence of academies upon the
Drama in Italy and France. Certainly, the form of
English plays leaves much to be desired upon the
score of art and careful workmanship. But this im-
perfection is the defect of a quality so valuable that,
while we regret and censure it, we are bound to remain
satisfied. The lively irregularities of a Dekker or a
Hey wood are more acceptable than the lifeless cor-
rectness of a Trissino or a Sperone. It was, moreover,
from the matrix of this untutored art that jewels like
'Hamlet* and 'Vittoria Corombona,' *The Broken

TECHNICAL TRADITION, 77

Heart/ and * The Maid's Tragedy/ emerged in all
their conspicuous lustre.

Great monuments of art must be judged by their
own ideal, and not by that of diverse, if no less com-
manding, excellence. The men who supplied the
London theatres in that age, understood their trade.
The art of writing plays was not acquired in the study,
but fostered by the intellectual conditions of the time.
It grew gradually from small beginnings to great
results. Successive masters developed this art, each
taking from his predecessors what they had to teach.
The playwrights formed a tradition. They acquired
technical dexterity in their use of words and rhythms,
ornaments of style, and modes of exposition. They
learned how to handle subjects dramatically, studied
the modes of entrances and exits, the introduction of
underplots, the heightening of action to a climax, the
creation of striking situations for their leading charac-
ters. It may be observed that in all branches of
intellectual industry, wherever technical discovery is
demanded as a condition of success, a school comes
into being. Men of the highest genius have first to
practise their art as a handicraft, before they breathe
into its forms the breath of their own spiritual life.
This was eminently the case with Italian painting.
Young artists were articled to Ghirlandajo at Florence,
to Perugino at Perugia, to Squarcione at Padua. In
the workshops of those masters the pupils learned how
to mix colours and compose the ground for fresco, how
to strain canvases and prepare surfaces ; they studied
design, perspective, drawing from the model ; be-
came acquainted with conventional methods of treating

78 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

secular and religious subjects. Something of the
same sort was true in the case of our Drama. Play-
wrights began life as journey-workmen, doing the odd
jobs of a company, or serving an employer like Hens-
lowe. In this apprenticeship they grew familiar with
the technical elements of their art, and were able to
employ these at a later period according to the dic-
tates of their own peculiar taste. Thus dramatic
composition in the sixteenth century was a trade, but a
trade which, like that of Sculpture in Athens, of Paint-
ing in Italy, of Music in Germany, allowed men of
creative genius to detach themselves from the ranks of
creditable handicraftsmen. Shakspere stands, where
Michelangelo and Pheidias stand, above all rivals;
but he owed his dexterity to training. Had he been
a solitary worker, exploring the rules and methods of
dramatic art by study of classical masterpieces and re-
flection upon aesthetical treatises, it is inconceivable
that his plays would have exhibited that facility of style
and that unlimited command of theatrical resources
which left his hands at liberty to mould the stuff of
human nature into luminous form. Power over the
machinery of art and familiarity with technical pro-
cesses, which, unless completely mastered, are a hin-
drance to inventive genius ; this is what a Shakspere, a
Michelangelo, a Pheidias, must ever owe to the labours
of predecessors and contemporaries.

In estimating the Drama as a whole, we are thus
bound to give its just weight to unencumbered free-
dom of development ; for this freedom formed, if not
a school of playwrights, a tradition of playwriting,
which was essentially natural and yet in a strict sense

DRAMATIC CLAIRVOYANCE. 79

methodical. That much imperfect, crude, untutored
work was due to this same freedom, may be conceded ;
but this drawback should not be allowed to outweigh
so singular advantages. Perhaps the real artistic
excellence of that dramatic literature would be made
more manifest, if some impartial critic should select the
best plays of the period from the rubbish, and present
these in one series to the reader. It would then be
seen how admirable was the skill displayed by a large
number of craftsmen, how various were their sources of
inspiration, and yet how remarkable is the unity of
tone pervading works so diverse.

XIX.

We are led by these observations to consider
another point affecting the art of the English drama-
tists. During the short period in which they flourished,
there prevailed in our island what may be called, for
want of an exacter phrase, clairvoyance in dramatic
matters. Of all the playwrights of that time, whatever
were their feelings, and however they differed in degree
of ability, not one but had a special tact, facility and
force of touch upon the Drama. Weak, uncertain, and
affected in other branches of literature, in satire, epi-
gram, complimentary epistle, even narrative, these men
showed strength, firmness, and directness when they
had to write a scene. To explain this fact would be
more difficult than to find parallels and illustrations
from other nations and from other ages. The ancient
Greeks and the Italians of the Renaissance possessed
clairvoyance in the plastic arts. The present age is

8o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

clairvoyant in science and the application of science
to purposes of utility. At each great epoch of the
world's history the mind of man has penetrated more
deeply than at others into some particular subject, has
interrogated Nature in its own way, solving for one
period of time intuitively and with ease problems
which, before and after, it has been unable with pains
to apprehend in that same manner.

In the days of our dramatic supremacy, the nature
of man became in its entirety the subject of representa-
tive poetry ; and the apocalypse of man was more com-
plete than at any other moment of the world s history.
Shakspere and his greater contemporaries reveal human
passions, thoughts, aspirations, sentiments, and motives
of action with evidence so absolute, with so obvious
an absence of any intervenient medium, that the crea-
tions even of Sophocles, of Calderon, of Corneille,
when compared with these, seem to represent abstract
conceptions or animated forms rather than the inner
truths of life.

In order to estimate the force of this dramatic in-
sight, we might compare the stories on which our
dramatists founded their tragedies with the tragedies
themselves — * Romeo and Juliet ' or ' Othello ' with the
novels of Da Porto or Cinthio, * The Duchess of Malfi '
with Bandello's prose, *Arden of Feversham' with
Holinshed's Chronicle. It would then be evident that,
taking the mere outline of a plot, they filled this in
with human life of poignant intensity, 'piercing' (to
use those words of Milton) ' dead things with in-
breathed sense.' The tales from which the play-
wrights drew their tragedies, contained incident in

INSIGHT INTO HUMAN NATURE. 8i

plenty but feeble silhouettes of character, enough of
rhetoric but no passion of poetry, enough moralising
but little of world-wisdom. The dramatists knew how
to use the framework, while they changed the spirit of
these pieces ; animating them with salient portraiture
of men and women studied from the life, adorning
them with unpremeditated song, and making them the
lesson-books of practical philosophy.

The clairvoyance of our [)laywrights enabled them
to understand the true nature of their art ; to separate
the epic, idyllic, or didactic mode of treatment from the
dramatic. They felt that the essential duty of the ^
drama is that it should not moralise, but that it should .
exhibit character in action. Therefore, they made
action the main point ; and it was their incommuni-
cable gift, the gift of a great moment, that nothing
which they touched was failing in the attribute of active
energy.

Furthermore, this clairvoyance gave them insight
into things beyond their own experience. Shakspere
painted much that he had never seen ; and it was true
to nature. As the skilled anatomist will reconstruct
from scattered bones an animal long since extinct, so
from one trait of character he reasoned out the complex
of a man or woman. He made that man or woman
stand before us, not as the embodiment of one selected
quality, but as a living and incalculable organism.
This power, in a greater or a less degree, was shared by
his contemporaries. They owed it to that intuition
into human character which was the virtue of their age.
Familiar with the idea of man, they never found them-
selves at fault when man, the subject of their art,

82 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

appeared before them in an antiquated or a foreign
mode. This explains the vivid treatment which all
phases of past history received from them. The
heroes of Greece and Rome, of the Bible and Norse
Sagas, of Chivalrous Romance and Southern Fiction,
were equally real in their eyes with men of their own
age and kindred ; because they neglected accidental
points of difference, and understood what man has
been and man must be.

/ Whatever material was presented to them for
manipulation, the truth at which they aimed was
always psychological. A Roman or an Ancient Briton,
a Greek or an Italian, was for them simply a man. They
cared not to take him upon any other terms. Thus
they divested their art of frivolous preoccupations con-
cerning local colour, costume, upholstery, and all the
insignificances which are apt to intervene between us
and the true truth of a past event. If they lack know-
ledge of special customs, geographical relations, or
political circumstance, their judgments on the passions,
aims, duties, and home-instincts of humanity arc keen

, and searching.

XX.

This brings me not unnaturally to consider a ques-
tion of great moment : What was the moral teaching
of our dramatists ? Speaking broadly, we may an-
swer— unexceptionable. That is to say, their tone is
manly and wholesome ; the moral sense is not offended
by doubtful hints, or debilitated by vice made inte-
resting— the sentimentalism of more modern fiction.

MORALITY OF THE DRAMA. 83

What is bad, is recognised as bad, and receives no
extenuation. It cannot, however, be denied that there
are exceptions to this healthiness of tone. Some of
Fletchers, Ford's, and Massinger s plays are founded
upon subjects radically corrupt , while the touch of
these latter dramatists on questions of conduct and
taste is often insecure and casuistical. The student
who peruses the whole of Beaumont and Fletcher's
works, will hardly recommend them for family reading,
and will probably be inclined to feel with Leigh Hunt
that he has suffered some outrage to his own sense of
right and wrong, of cleanliness and decency.

It is not needful to observe that almost every play
of that epoch contains much that is coarse in senti-
ment and gross in language. The comedies, especially,
abound in undisguised indelicacy. But, for the most
part, these ribald scenes and clownish jokes are ex-
crescences upon the piece itself; and though they are
justly disagreeable to a modern taste, they convey no
lessons of wantonness. If Spungius and Hircius,
Rutilio and Annabella, Bellafront and Malefort, were
to contend for the prize of impurity with the heroes
and heroines of modern French fiction, they would
assuredly have small chance of success.

The theatres of London were the resort of pro-
fligate and noisy persons, causing constant annoyance
to their neighbourhoods. Therefore, as will be set
forth in a separate essay of this volume, the Corpora-
tion resisted their establishment within the City bounds,
and reluctantly tolerated them in the suburbs. Puritan
divines denounced their teaching from the pulpit ;

while a succession of books and pamphlets taxed them

G 2

S4 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

with corrupting manners. But though it was manifest
that playhouses encouraged loose living in the persons
who frequented them, and though the social influence
of plays upon the youth of London was at least ques-
tionable, neither the last Tudor nor the first Stuart
attempted to suppress them on this account. Besides
enjoying theatrical representations with keen relish
herself, Elizabeth seems to have understood their
utility as means of popular education. To institute a
censorship of plays, to restrain unlicensed companies
from acting, to forbid the exercise of this art upon
Sundays, to make the use of blasphemous oaths in
dramatic compositions penal, and to punish the publica-
tion of seditious or scandalous libels, were the utmost
measures taken by successive Governments in regulating
the morals of the theatre. For the rest, they trusted,
not without good reason, to the wholesome instincts of
the people, with whom the playwrights lived and wrote
in closest sympathy. It was only when the tone of a
profligate Court began to make itself felt on the public
stage, that a distinct tendency to deterioration became
evident.

XXI.

Whatever view may be taken about the morality
of the Elizabethan Drama, one thing is certain. It
formed a school of popular instruction, a rallying-point
, of patriotism. The praises of civil and religious
liberty, the celebration of national glories, reached all
ears from the theatres. Here the people learned to
love their Queen and to hate slavery. They saw before

PATRIOTISM. 85

their eyes the deeds of patriots and heroes vividly
enacted. They grew famih'ar with the history of
England. The horrors of bad government and civil
strife, the baneful influence of Court favourites, the cor-
ruptions of a priestly rule and the iniquities of des-
potism, were written plainly in large characters for all to
read. Poets, orators, and scholars poured forth learn-
ing, eloquence, and imagery to express to Englishmen
the greatness of their past, the splendour of their
destiny. No national epic could have been so potent
in the formation of a noble consciousness as those
dramatic scenes which reproduced the triumphs of
Crecy and Agincourt, the wars of York and Lancaster,
the struggle of the Reformation, and the Defeat of the
Armada. If the ballad of ' Chevy Chase ' stirred Sir
Philip Sidney like the blast of a trumpet, how must
the dying words of Gaunt have thrilled an English
audience ? Rarely did one of our dramatists mention
any island without some passionate praise of England.
The coldest kindled at this theme : ^

Look on England,
The Empress of the European isles ;
When did she flourish so, as when she was
The mistress of the ocean, her navies
Putting a girdle round about the world ?
When the Iberian quaked, her worthies named ;
And the fair flower de luce grew pale, set by
The red rose and the white ?

It was indeed no idle boast of Hey wood's, when he
contended that the pageantry of heroism and patriot-
ism, displayed before a people on the stage, bred
virtue and inflamed the soul to emulation.

' MsLSs'mgei's Maid 0/ Honour.

86 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

It cannot be doubted that the stage exercised
wide-reaching influence over the development of
English character at a moment when the nation was
susceptible to such impressions. Reading the plays
of Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, Heywood, Chapman,
Dekker, Beaumont, we are fain to cry with Milton :
* Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep,
and shaking her invincible locks : methinks I see her
like an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling
her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam ; purging
and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain
itself of heavenly radiance : while the whole noise of
timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love
the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means,
and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year
of sects and schisms.'

Even the Puritans may have felt grateful to the
playhouse when they came to exchange their character
of private sanctimoniousness for one of public resist-
ance to tyranny. Then they found in the people a
nobility of spirit and a deeply rooted zeal for freedom,
which had been brought to consciousness in no small
measure by the stage. These obligations remained,
however, unrecognised ; and perhaps it is even only
now that we are beginning to acknowledge them.
The Drama had done its work before the Civil Wars
began. Its vigour was exhausted ; every day it be-
came less pure, more subservient to the pleasures of a
luxurious Court. When it revived with Charles II.
^ it had changed its character. The function of the
theatre in England had been great and beneficial ; it

INFLUENCE OVER NATIONAL CHARACTER, 87

had helped to cherish a strong sense of national
honour, to popularise the new ideas and liberal culture
which permeated Europe ; it had evolved an original
and stable type of art, developed the resources of our
language, and enriched the world with inexhaustible
funds of poetry. Now it was dead, and only the faint
shadow of its former self survived.

Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit :
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ;
And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured ;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude ;
And boisterous English wit with art indued.
Our age was cultivated thus at length ;
But what we gained in skill, we lost in strength :
Our builders were with want of genius cursed ;
The second temple was not like the first.

Thus wrote Dryden to Congreve on his * Double
Dealer,' mingling false compliment with sound criticism.

XXII.

One point, incidentally dropped in the foregoing
paragraph, remains for consideration. What are the
obligations of the English language to the Drama ?
Heywood, in the Apology to which I have already
alluded, adduces, among other arguments in favour of
the stage, that through its means English had been
raised * from the most rude and unpolished tongue * to
' a most perfect and composed language.' Each play-
wright, he adds, attempted to discover fresh beauties

88 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

of rhythm and expression, and to leave the dialect
more pliable and fertile for his successors.

During the half-century in which the Drama
flourished, English became a language capable of con-
veying exquisite, profound, and varied thought. The
elements of which it is composed, were fused into one
vital whole. And though we dare not attribute this
advance to the Drama alone, yet if we compare the
poetry of that age with contemporary prose, it will
be clear that, while both started nearly on a par, the
style of the prosaists declined in perspicuity and
rhythm, while that of the playwrights became versatile,
melodious, and dignified. Even the prose writing of
the stage was among the best then going. Lyly, first
of English authors, produced prose of scrupulous refine-
ments ; Nash used a prose of incomparable epigram-
matic pungency ; while some of Shakspere's prose is
modern in its clearness. A similar comparison between
the verse of the Drama and that of translations from
the Latin or of satire and elegy — Phaers Virgil,
Marston's * Scourge of Villany,' or Donne's episdes
for example — will lead to not dissimilar results. The
dramatic poetry of the period is superior to all but its
lyrics.*

It is not difficult to understand why this should be.
The capabilities of the English language were exer-
cised in every department by dramatic composition.
For the purposes of conversation, it had to assume
epigrammatic terseness. In description of scenery,

* These remarks must of course be taken in a general sense. It
would be easy to adduce Sidney^s Defence of Poetry diS an example of pure
prose, Fairfaxes Tasso as a specimen of pure translation, and the Faery
Queen as a masterpiece of lucid narrative in verse.

DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH, 89

and in the eloquent outpouring of passion, it suggested
pictures to the mind and clothed gradations of emotion
with appropriate words. At one time the sustained
periods of oratory were needed ; at another, the swiftest
and most airy play of fancy had to be conveyed in
passages of lyric lightness. Different characters de-
manded different tones of diction, yet every utterance
conformed to uniformity of style and rhythm. Through-
out all changes, the writer was obliged to remain clear
and intelligible to his audience.

In handling the language of the theatre, each author
developed some specific quality. The fluent grace of
Hey wood, the sweet sentiment of Dekker, Marston's
pregnant sentences, the dream-like charm of Fletcher s
melody, Marlowe's mighty line, Webster's sombreness
of pathos and heart-quaking bursts of rage, Jonson's
gravity, Massinger s smooth-sliding eloquence. Ford's
adamantine declamation, and the style of Shakspere,
which embraces all — as some great organ holds all
instruments within its many stops — these remain as
monuments of composition for succeeding ages. Who
shall estimate what benefits those men conferred upon
the English speech ? Our ancestors accustomed their
ears to that variety of music, impregnated their in-
tellects with all those divers modes of thought. Be-
sides, the vocabulary was nearly doubled. Shakspere
is said to have some 15,000, while the Old Testament
contains under 6,000 words. The dramatists collected
floating idioms, together with the technical phraseology
of trades and professions, the learned nomenclature of
the schools, the racy proverbs of the country, the cere-
monious expressions of the Court and Council-chamber,

90 SHAKSPEKE'S PREDECESSORS.

and gave them all a place in literature. Instead of
being satisfied with the meagre and artificial diction of
the Popian age, we may now return to those 'pure wells
of English undefiled/ and from their inexhaustible
springs refresh our language when it seems to fail.

Nor must it finally be forgotten that the Drama,
in its effort after self-emancipation, created the great
^ pride of English poetry — blank verse. Further occa-
sion will be granted me for dwelling upon this point
in detail. It is enough here to remark that when
Milton used blank verse for the Epic, he received it
from the Drama, and that the blank verse of the present
century is consciously affiliated to that of the Eliza-
bethan age.

XXIII.

To conclude a panegyric, rather than criticism, of
the English Drama, it would be well to give some
history of opinion regarding so great a treasure of our
literature during the past three centuries.

Not very long ago Shakspere himself was half-
forgotten. By degrees admirers disinterred his plays,
and wrote of him as though he had been born like
Pallas from the brain of Jupiter. Garrick reformed,
and acted some of his chief parts. Johnson paid surly
homage to his genius ; but of Shakspere's contem-
poraries this critic said that ' they were sought after
because they were scarce, and would not have been
scarce had they been much esteemed.' Malone and
Steevens, about the same time, made it known that
other playwrights of great merit flourished with Shak-
spere in the days of his pre-eminence. The book-

HISTORY OF CRITICISM, 91

seller, Dodsley, published twelve volumes of old plays.
Gifford spent pains upon the text of some of them, and
Scott used their defunct reputation for a mask to
headings of his chapters. They became the shibboleth
of a coterie. Coleridge and Hazlitt lectured on them.
Charles Lamb made selections, which he enriched with
notes of purest gold of criticism. The * Retrospective
Review ' printed meritorious notices of the more obscure
authors. After those early days, Alexander Dyce,
Hartley Coleridge, J. O. Halliwell, Thomas Wright,
and many others, began to edit the scattered works of
eminent dramatists with antiquarian zeal and critical
ability; while J. P. Collier illustrated by his industry
and learning the theatrical annals of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Continuing this pious tradition, a
host of eloquent and genial writers have risen to vindi-
cate the honours of that Drama in our times. I have
attempted in the preface to this volume to recognise
the luminous and solid labours of contemporary scholars
in this field. It cannot now be said that the English
Drama has not received its due meed of attention
from literary men. But it may still be said that it is
not sufficiently known to the reading public.

For the close of this exordium and prelude to more
detailed studies, I will borrow words from a prose
writer in whom the spirit of old English rhetoric lived
again with singular and torrid splendour. De Quincey
writes about our Drama : * No literature, not excepting
even that of Athens, has ever presented such a mul-
tiform theatre, such a carnival display, mask and
antimask, of impassioned life — breathing, moving,
acting, suffering, laughing :

92 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Quicquid agunt homines : votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus :

All this, but far more truly and more adequately than
was or could be effected in that field of composition
which the gloomy satirist contemplated, whatsoever in
fact our medieval ancestors exhibited in the ** Dance of
Death," drunk with tears and laughter, may here be
reviewed, scenically draped, and gorgeously coloured.
What other national Drama can pretend to any com-
petition with this ? '

CHAPTER III.

MIRACLE PLAYS.

L Emergence of the Drama from the Mystery — Ecclesiastical Con-
demnation of Theatres and Players — Obscure Survival of Mimes
from Pagan Times — Their Place in Medieval Society. — IL
Hroswitha — Liturgical Drama. — III. Transition to the Mystery or
Miracle Play — Ludi — Italian Sucre Rappresentasioni — Spanish Auto
— French Myst^re — English Miracle. — IV'. Passage of the Miracle
from the Clergy to the People — From Latin to the Vulgar Tongue —
Gradual Emergence of Secular Drama, — V. Three English Cycles
— Origin of the Chester Plays— Of the Coventry Plays — Differences
between the Three Sets — Other Places famous for Sacred Plays. —
VI. Methods of Representation — Pageant — Procession — Italian,
French, and Spanish Peculiarities — The Guilds— Cost of the Show—
Concourse of People — Stage Effects and Properties. — VII. Relation
of the Miracle to Medieval Art — Materialistic Realism — Place in the
Cathedral — Effect upon the Audience. — VIII. Dramatic Elements
in the Miracles — Tragedy — Pathos — Melodrama — Herod and the
Devil. — IX. Realistic Comedy — Joseph — Noah's Wife — The Nativity
— Pastoral Interludes. — X. Transcripts from Common Life — Satire
— The Woman Taken in Adultery — Mixture of the Sacred and the
Grotesque. — XI. The Art of the Miracles and the Art of Italian
Sacri Monti.

N.B. — The text of the Widkirk or Towneley Miracles will be found
in the Surtees Society's Publications, 1836. That of the Coventry and
Chester Plays in the Old Shakespeare Society's Publications, 1841, 1843.

The gradual emergence of our national Drama from
the Miracle, the Morality, and the Interlude has been
clearly defined and often described. I do not now
propose to attempt a learned discussion of this process.
That has been ably done already by Markland, Sharp,
Wright, . Collier, and others, whose labours have been

^4 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

briefly condensed by Ward in his History. But, as a
preface to any criticism on the English Drama, some
notice must be taken of those medieval forms of art
which are no less important in their bearings upon the
accomplished work of Shakspere's age than are the
Romanesque mosaics or the sculpture of the Pisan
school upon the mature products of the Italian Re-
naissance. Art, like Nature, takes no sudden leaps,
nihil agit per saltum\ and the connection between the
Miracles and Shaksperes Drama is unbroken, though
the aesthetic interval between them seems almost
infinite.

A drama on Christ's Passion, called the Xptcrro?
Trdarxwvy ascribed to Gregory of Nazianzus in the
fourth century, is still extant. This play, as its name
denotes, conformed to the spirit of Greek tragedy, and
professed to exhibit the sufferings of Christ upon the
cross, as those of Prometheus upon Caucasus had been
displayed before an Attic audience. But it was im-
possible in the decadence of Greek literature, in the
age which witnessed the fierce strife of Arians and
Athanasians, and the Pagan revival attempted by Julian,
to treat that central fact of Christian history with
literary freedom. Gregory's Passion-play is a series
of monologues rather than a drama, a lucubration of
the study rather than a piece adapted to the stage. Its
scholastic origin is betrayed by the authors ingenuity
in using passages and lines extracted from Athenian
tragedies ; and his work at the present day owes its
value chiefly to the centos from Euripides which it
contains. Moreover, at this epoch the theatre was
becoming an abomination to the Church. The bloody

DRAAfA IN EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 95

shows of Rome, the shameless profligacy of Byzantium,
justified ecclesiastics in denouncing both amphitheatre
and circus as places given over to the devil. From the
point of view of art, again, the true spirit of dramatic
poetry had expired in those orgies of lust and cruelty.
With the decline of classic culture and the triumph
of dogmatic Christianity, the Drama, which had long
ceased to be a fine art, fell into the hands of an obscure
and despised class. It is impossible to believe that
the race of players expired in Europe. Indeed, we
have sufficient evidence that during the earlier Middle
Ages such folk kept alive in the people a kind of natural
paganism, against which the Church waged ineffectual
war. The stigma attaching to the playwright's and
the actor's professions even in the golden age of the
Renaissance may be ascribed to monastic and eccle-
siastical denunciations, fulminated against strolling
mimes and dancers, buffoons and posture-makers,
' thymelici, scurra^, et mimi,' in successive councils
and by several bishops. Undoubtedly, these social
pariahs, the degenerate continuators of a noble craft
by the very fact that they were excommunicated and
tabooed, denied the Sacraments and grudgingly con-
signed at death to holy ground, lapsed more and more
into profanity, indecency, and ribaldry. While excluded
from an honoured status in the commonwealth, they
yet were welcomed at seasons of debauch and jollity.
The position which they held was prominent if not
respectable, as the purveyors of amusement, instru-
ments of pleasure, and creatures of fashionable caprice.
Among the Northern races circumstances favoured the
amelioration of their lot. The bard and the skald

96 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

held high rank in Teutonic society ; and it was natural
that a portion of this credit should fall upon the player
and buffoon. With the advance of time, we find
several species of their craft established as indispens-
able members of medieval society. It must, moreover,
be remembered that all through the Middle Ages, in
spite of prevalent orthodoxy and the commanding
power of the Church, a spirit survived from the old
heathen past, antagonistic to the principles of Christian
morality, which we may describe as naturalism or as
paganism according to our liking. This spirit was at
home in the castles of the nobles and in the companies
of wandering students. It invaded the monasteries,
and, in the person of Golias, took up its place beside
the Abbot's chair. The *Carmina Vagorum* and some
of the satires ascribed to Walter Mapes sufficiently
illustrate the genius of these pagans in the Middle
Ages. ThejoculatorcSy whom the Church had banned,
became in course of time Jongleurs and jugglers. To
them we owe Xki^fabliatix. Meanwhile the vimisteriales ,
or house-servants of the aristocracy, took the fairer
name of minstrels. Lyric poetry rose, in the new
dialects of the Romance nations, to a place of honour
through the genius of troubadours and trouveres, who
were recognised as lineal descendants from mifni and
histriones. Taillefer himself, who led the van on Senlac
field, tossing his sword into the air and singing Roland,
is thus described by Guy of Amiens in verses which
retain the old prejudice against the class of players :

Histrio, cor audax nimium quern nobilitabat . . .
Incisor-ferri mimus cognomine dictus.

VARIOUS KINDS OF PLA VERS, 97

Rhapsodes, again, who recited the Chansons de Geste,
so popular among the Franks and Normans, laid the
foundations of imaginative literature in their Songs
of Roland and Charlemagne. Descendants from the
ciiharistcB of base Latin, these left the name of jester
in our English speech. Thus it is hardly too much '
to say that the despised race of players in the Middle
Ages helped to sow the seeds of modern lyrical and
epical poetry, of social and political satire, of novel /
and romance. They contributed little, in the earlier
age at least, to the development of the Drama. The
part they played in this creation at a later period was,
however, of considerable moment. This will be mani-
fest when we come to the point at which the clergy
began to lose their hold upon the presentation of
Mysteries and Miracles.

II.

Meanwhile another species of dramatic art had
been attempted in the cloister during the tenth century.
Hroswitha, a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim, wrote
six comedies in Latin for the entertainment of her
sisterhood. Inspired with the excellent notion of not
letting the devil keep the good tunes to himself,
she took Terence for her model, and dramatised the
legendary history of Christian Saints and Confessors.
It is needful to pay this passing tribute to Hroswitha,
if only for the singularity of her endeavour. But it
would be uncritical in the highest sense of the word to
regard her, any more than the Greek author of the
Xptcrros ndaxcDVy as a founder or precursor of the modern

98 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Stage. The real origins of our drama have to be
sought elsewhere.

Recent investigations have thrown a flood of new
light on what is now known as the Liturgical Drama.
It has been pointed out that the Office of the Mass is
itself essentially dramatic, and that from very early
times it became a custom to supplement the liturgy
with scenic representations. The descent of the angel
Gabriel at the Feast of the Annunciation, the proces-
sion of the Magi at Epiphany, the birth of Christ at
Christmas, the Resurrection from the tomb at Easter-
tide, may be mentioned among the more obvious and
common of these shows invented by the clergy to
illustrate the chief events of Christian history, and to
enforce the principal dogmas of the faith upon an un-
lettered laity by means of acting. The parish priest,
aided by the good folk of the village, managed these
theatrical displays, of which the scene was usually the
church, and the occasion service time on festivals. This
appears from a somewhat ribald episode in the old
novel of * Howleglas,' which narrates the pranks played
by the rogue upon the priest, his master for the time.
* In the mean season, while Howleglas was parish
clerk, at Easter they should play the Resurrection of
our Lord : and for because the men were not learned
and could not read, the priest took his leman, and
put her in the grave for an Angel : and this seeing,
Howleglas took to him three of the simplest persons
that were in the town, that played the three Maries ;
and the parson played Christ, with a banner in his
hand.' The lives of the Saints were treated after the
same fashion ; and since it was needful to instruct the

LITURGICAL PAGEANTS, 99

people through their senses, dramatic shows on all
the more important feast days formed a regular part
of the Divine service. From the Church this custom
spread by a natural transition to the chapels of religious
confraternities and the trade-halls of the guilds, who
celebrated their patron saints with scenic shows and ^
pageants. To what extent words were used on these
occasions, and at what date dialogue was introduced, is
doubtful. Yet this is a matter of purely antiquarian
interest. The passage from dumb show, through simple
recitation of such phrases as the AngeFs * Ave Maria
gratia plena,' to a more dramatic form of representation,
was inevitable ; while our copious collections of Latin
hymns, lauds, litanies, and Passion monologues, prove
that appropriate choral accompaniments were never
wanting. The chief point to be borne in mind is that
from an early period of the Middle Ages the Church
accustomed men to acting in connection with her
services ; and that, while the clergy took care to keep
this adjunct to the liturgy in their control, the people
participated, and thus became familiarised with drama
as a form of art When we reflect that the Scripture ^

and the legends of the Saints formed almost the whole
intellectual treasure of the laity, we shall better under-
stand the importance of the religious Drama which thus
came into existence. It was not, as it now might be,
a thing apart from life, reserved for pious contempla-
tion. It gave artistic shape to all reflections upon
life ; presented human destinies in their widest scope
and their most striking details ; incorporated medieval
science, ethics, history, cosmography, and politics ;

H 2

loo SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

bringing abstractions vividly before the eyes and ears
of folk who could not read.

III.

The transition from the liturgical drama and the
ecclesiastical pageant to the Miracle or Mystery was
simple. Exactly at what date plays setting forth the
Scripture history and legends of the Saints in words
intended to be spoken, were first composed, we do not
know. But from the extant specimens of such plays in
the chief languages of Europe, it seems clear that they
were already widely diffused before the middle of the
thirteenth century ; and it is probable that the festival
of Corpus Christi, instituted in 1264 by Urban IV.,
gave an impulse to their performance. The text was
written by monks, and in the first instance almost cer-
tainly in Latin. The common name for them was
Ludus. Thus we read in the Friulian Chronicles that
a Ludus Christi, embracing the principal events from
the Passion to the Second Advent, was acted at
Cividale in the Marches of Treviso in 1298. Our
Coventry Miracles are called Ludus Coven tries. As
early as 1 1 10 a * Ludus de S. Katharina ' was repre-
sented at Dunstaple by Geoffrey, Abbot of S. Albans.

As these sacred dramas became more popular, the
vernacular was substituted for Latin in their composi-
tion, their scope was enlarged until it embraced the
whole of Christian history, and the artistic form assumed
a different shape and name in different countries. In
France a distinction was drawn between the Mystere
and the Miracle ; the former being adapted from Scrip-

GROWTH OF A REUGIOUS DRAAfA. loi

ture, the latter from the legend of a saint. One of the
very earliest religious dramas in a modern language is
the Mysth^e de la Rdsurrectioji, ascribed to the twelfth
century. In Italy the generic name for such plays in
the vulgar tongue was Sacra Rappresefttazione ; while
subordinate titles like Divoziofu, Misterio, Miracolo,
Figura, Passione, Festa, and so forth, indicated the
specific nature of the subject in each particular case.
Italy, it may be said in passing, developed the religious
drama on a somewhat different method from the rest
of Europe. The part played in its creation by private
confraternities was more important than that of the
Church ; and with the exception of the Friulian Ludus
already mentioned, we are not aware of any very early
plays in Italy exactly corresponding to those of the
North. In Spain the name of Auto became con-
secrated to the sacred Drama. In England, after the
use of Ludus had gone out of fashion, that of Miracle
obtained. William Fitz-Stephen, writing about the end
of the twelfth century, describes the plays of London as
' repraesentationes miraculorum quae sancti confessores
opcrati sunt, seu repraesentationes passionum quibus
claruit constantia martyrum.' Matthew Paris, half a cen-
tury later, says that Geoffrey s * Ludus de S. Katharina '
was of the sort which * miracula vulgariter appellamus.'
Wright, in his edition of the Chester Plays, quotes
from a medieval Latin tale a similar phrase, * spectacula
quae miracula appellare consuevimus.' This name of
Miracle was never lost in England. Langland in
* Piers Ploughman ' speaks of Miracles, and Chaucer of
Plays of Miracles.

Not only did the name thus vary, while the sub-

I02 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Stance of the thing was much the same through
Europe ; but the mode of treatment differed consider-
ably. In France, although both Mysteries and Mira-
cles ran to an inordinate length, counting many thou-
sands of lines, and requiring more than one day for
their presentation, they were confined to certain epi-
sodes and portions of the Sacred History. In Italy
this limitation of the subject was even more marked ;
while none of the Sizcre Rappresentazioni exceed the
proportions of a moderate modern play. The distinctive
point about the English Miracle, as we possess it, is
that it incorporated into one cycle of plays the whole
history of the world from the Creation to the Last
^Judgment ; successive episodes being selected to illus-
trate God s dealings with the human race in the Fall,
the Deluge, the Antitypes of Christ, our Lords birth,
life, and death. His Resurrection, Ascension, and Second
Advent. This needs to be specially noted ; for it is a
characteristic of the Sacred Drama in our island.

IV.

The Miracles and Mysteries remained for a long
while in the hands of the clergy. They were composed
by monks, and acted in churches, monasteries, or on
meadows conveniently situated near religious houses.
Yet we have seen already that, side by side with these
ecclesiastical players, there existed a class of popular
and profane actors ; and also that the laity were pressed
into the service of the Liturgical Drama. It was,
therefore, natural that in course of time laymen should
encroach upon this function of the clergy. According

MIRACLES AND MYSTERIES, 103

to an uncertain tradition, it was as early as 1 268 that y
the trading companies began to play in England ; and
we know that in 1258 the performances of strolling
actors had been prohibited in monasteries. We may
also assume that about this date English was beginning
to supplant Latin and Norman French in the Miracles.
By the year 1398, when the Brothers of the Passion
founded a sort of permanent theatre in Paris for the
representation of their Mysteries, it is clear that the
religious drania had already for a long space of time
passed out of the hands of the clergy in France. In
England at the same date a similar change had cer-
tainly taken place. The Guilds in the great towns
were now performing Cyclical Miracles upon their own ^
account, employing the craftsmen of their several
trades, or else engaging the services of professionals,
called ' players of price.' ^ So much matter of a comic ^
and satirical nature, alien to the original purpose of
edification, had been mixed up with the performance,
that the Church at this epoch was rather anxious to
restrain than to encourage the participation of the
clergy. Chaucer's portrait of the Jolly Absolon —

Sometime to show his lightnesse and maistrie
He plaieth Herode on a skaffold hie —

gives a hint of abuses to which the ancient cus-
tom had become liable. After much moralising and
preaching against the practice, it was finally forbidden

* The speech of the Tertius Vexillator^ which closes the Prologue of
the Coventry Play, seems to point to a performance by strolling players,
as the insertion of N in lieu of the place where the Miracle was to be
shown indicates that it was not performed at Co vent r>' alone.

I04 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

to the clergy in the first half of the sixteenth century
by Wolsey and Bonner.

After this fashion, the English Miracle sprang
from the Liturgical Drama, substituted Norman French

for Latin, and English for Norman French, outgrew
ecclesiastical control, and engrafted on its solemn art
the feats of skill and humours of the strolling players.
Originally instituted as a means of education by the
clergy, it preserved the religious character impressed
upon it to the last ; but in its passage from the cloister
to the market-place, and by its substitution of the
mother tongue for a learned language, it became

^ emphatically popular and national. The elements of
independent comedy and pathos, of satire and of alle-
gory, the free artistic handling of historic characters,
the customs of the stage, and the spectacular contri-
vances, with which it familiarised the nation, contained

\ the germ of what was afterwards our drama. When
the Middle Ages melted into the Renaissance, the sub-
stantial fabric of the Christian Miracle fell to pieces ;

' but those portions of the structure which had previously
been held for accidents and excrescences were then
found adequate to the creation of a new and self-
sufficing art Dogma disappeared. The mythology
and history of Christian faith retreated once more to
the church, the pulpit, and the study. Humanity was
liberated ; and our playwrights dealt with man as the
material of their emancipated art. This evolution cor-
responds exactly to the passage which society effected
from the vast and comprehensive systems of medieval
feudalism into the minor but more highly organised,
more structurally complicated, modern States.

THREE ENGLISH CYCLES. 105

The three Cycles of * Miracles' which have come
down to us are known severally as those of Widkirk, ( Va>x.<.^
Chester, and Coventry, from the places where they
were performed. They are composed in English,
with embedded fragments of Latin and of French, ^
betraying their descent from older originals written in
those languages. We must in truth regard these vast
collections as the accretions of many previous essays in
religious drama, the mature form assumed by a long
series of literary experiments. In spite of their colos-
sal rudeness, they are clearly no primitive works of
art, but the final outcome of a slowly developed
evolution. Like the architectural monuments of the
Middle Ages, no single author claims them for his own.
They are the work of numberless unknowji collabora-
tors contributing to one harmonious whole. In point
of style and diction, the Widkirk plays bear traces of
the oldest origin, and are ascribed by scholars to the
reign of Henr)^ VI. Those of Chester, in their pre-
sent form, are certainly more recent. We learn from
the Banes, or proclamation which introduced them to
the public, that they were first exhibited during the
mayoralty of Sir John Arnway in 1 268. Another pro-
clamation, dated 24 Henry VIII., ascribes their com-
position to Sir Henry Frances, a monk of Chester,
who obtained from Pope Clement (Clement V.
1 305-1 3 14 ?) one thousand days of pardon for ' every
person resorting in peaceable manner with good devo-
tion to hear and see the said plays from time to time/

io6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

A note to one of our MSS. of the Chester Miracles
further informs us that Ralph Higden, compiler of the
* Polycronicon/ ' was thrice at Rome before he could
obtain leave of the Pope to have them in the English
tongue.* Since Higden died in 1363 or 1373, we are
left to suppose that for nearly a century after their
first production they continued to be acted in Latin, or
perhaps more probably in French. There were many
reasons why the Papal Curia should regard the use of
English in these popular performances with jealousy.
Langland, Wickliff, and the Lollards, satirists of man-
ners, poets eager for ecclesiastical reforms, bold demo-
cratic sectaries, were proving in the fourteenth cen-
tury that England was no passive handmaid of the
Church of Rome. But Higden won his point, if we
may tnist this tradition ; and the English redaction of
the Miracles, upon this supposition, can be referred to
some time near the middle of the fourteenth century.
It should, however, be observed that the whole of this
constructive criticism rests upon the very frailest basis.
The Banes, published in 1600, ascribes the authorship
to * one Don Rendall, monk of Chester Abbey ; ' and
a note appended to the proclamation of 1 5 1 5 gives it
to * Randall Higgenett, a monk of Chester Abbey,*
naming 1327 as the date of the first version. This
confusion of Higden and Higgenett, Ralph and Randal,
excites suspicion ; and all that remains tolerably cer-
tain is that the plays were instituted at the end of the
thirteenth, and produced in English some time in the
fourteenth century. They continued to be regularly
acted at Whitsuntide until 1577, and were revived in
i6cx), which is the date of our extant version.

WIDKIRK, CHESTER, COVENTRY. 107

The Coventry Miracles have descended to us in a
MS. of 1468, entitled * Ludus Coventriae, sive Ludus
Corporis Christi/ In form and style they are less
archaic than those of Widkirk and even of Chester,
while certain passages in the plays themselves enable
us to assign their composition, in part at all events,
to the reign of Henry VII. They were played at
the festival of Corpus Christi by the Grey Friars of
Coventry.

The Widkirk plays consist of thirty pieces, the
Chester of twenty-four, the Coventry of forty-two.
All of them embrace the history of man's creation,
fall, and redemption, stories from the Old Testament,
the life of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell, and the
Judgment of the world. The Apocryphal Gospels as
well as the New Testament are largely drawn upon.
They dispose of the same matter in different ways,
use different metrical structures, and exhibit many
other points of divergence. For example, the Coventry
Miracles contain an Assumption of the Virgin, and
the Chester a Coming of Antichrist, which are not to
be found in either of the corresponding cycles. Alli-
terative verse is used in combination with short
rhyming lines, modelled upon French originals. A
form of stanza, imitated from Latin hymnology, gives
singular richness by its thrice-repeated rhymes to
many scenes in the Chester plays. Of this structure I
will here extract a specimen from the speech of Regina
Damnata in the Chester Doomsday :

Alas ! alas ! now am I lorn !
Alas ! with teen now am I tom !
Alas ! that I was woman bom.
This bitter bale to abide !

io8 sHakspere's predecessors,

I made my moan even and morn,

For fear to come Jesu befom,

That crowned for me was with thorn,

And thrust into the side.
Alas ! that I was woman'wrought !
Alas ! why God made me'of naught,
And with His precious blood me bought,

To work against His will ?
Of lechery I never wrought.
But ever to that sin I sought.
That of that sin in deed and thought

Yet had I never my fill
Fie on pearls ! fie on pride !
Fie on gown ! fie on guyde ! *
Fie on hue ! fie on hide ! *

These harrow me to hell.
Against this chance I may not chide.
This bitter bale I must abide.
With wo and teen I suffer this tide.

No living tongue may telL
I that so seemly was in sight.
Where is my bleye * that was so bright ?
Where is the baron, where is the knight.

For me to leadge ^ the law ?
Where in the world is any wight,
That for my fairness now will fight,
Or from this death I am to dight *

That dare me hence to draw ?

The Coventry Plays make use of this same stanza,
but are more partial to quatrains of alternating rhymes
in verses of different lengths and measures. Speaking
broadly, the constniction of both Cycles'shows a highly
developed prosody, a familiarity with complicated me-
trical resources on the part of their compilers. The
Widkirk, Chester, and '^Coventry plays abound in local
references, and illustrate the dialects of their several
districts.

^ Guyde — ? ' Hide — skin. ' Bleye — complexion.

* Leadge — wrest. * Dight — assume.

MODES OF EXHIBITION, 109

Besides these three phices, we know for certain
that Miracles were commonly performed at Wymond-
ham, York, Newcastle, Manningtree, and Tewkesbury.
One William Melton of York in 1426 was termed ' a
professor of holy pageantry,* which seems to prove
that the actors in these dramas, and probably the
monkish scribes who wrote them, formed a recognised
class of artists. The city of Bristol exhibited a * Ship-
wrights' Play,' most likely in dumb show, upon the
Ark of Noah, before Henry VII. Cornwall had its
so-called Guary Miracles, which were religious spec-
tacles of a like nature. There is no reason to suppose
that any district of England was unprovided with the
means of producing them, though some towns, like
Coventry and Chester, took a special pride in present-
ing them with more than common splendour.

VI.

The Miracles were exhibited on wooden scaffolds,
either stationary in churches, or moved about the
streets on wheels. The Latin name for these erec-
tions was pagina^ which has been correctly derived
from the same root as pcgma, and which merged into
the English pageant. From the stage directions to
the plays it appears that in some cases the scaffold
contained several rooms or storeys, and this was no
doubt usual when the structure was set up in a church
or on a meadow. The movable carts on which the
players performed in towns like Chester consisted of
two rooms, a lower in which they dressed, and an
upper, open to the air, in which they acted. These

116 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

carts were drawn in order round the town, stopping at
fixed points for recitation, so that when one pageant
was finished, another arrived to continue the show
before the same group of spectators. From the pro-
cessional character communicated in this way to the
Miracle, the name processus as well as pagina was
sometimes given to each act in the Drama. For scenes
involving movement, actors in the streets were asso-
ciated with the actors on the stage. Messengers rode
up on horseback, and Herod or the Devil leapt from
the cart to rage about among the people.

It is interesting to compare these English customs
of the religious Drama with those of other countries.
In Italy we know that the Divozioni, when shown in
church, were performed upon a wooden scaffold raised
across the nave and divided into several departments,
with a central space for the chief action, smaller side-
rooms for subordinate scenes, a gallery for the celestial
personages, and a sunken pit for Satan and his crew.
The Edifizi, or movable towers, exhibited by the
chief guilds of Florence on S. John s Day, corresponded
in all essential respects to the pageants of Chester,
except that they were undoubtedly adorned with
greater richness of artistic details. This Florentine
procession set forth the whole of Christian history
from the Fall of Lucifer to the Last Judgment ; but
the show was strictly pantomimic, being presented
in tableaux without speech. In France, before the
establishment of a regular religious theatre in 1402,
Mysteries were performed, after a like fashion, either
processionally in the streets or on temporary scaffolds
erected for the purpose in a consecrated building. In

L\' ITALY, FRANCE, SPAIN, ENGLAND, in

Spain the exhibition of the Aiitos took place in
churches, until this practice was forbidden in 1565.
Yet the highly elaborated form of art developed from
them with such magnificence by Calderon retained the
nature of a sacred show. Late on into the seven-
teenth century the Aitto was presented on an open
square in daylight, with accompaniment of flambeaux
and candles. It must have been a spectacle of sin-
gular and curious magnificence : the wide piazza in the
white glare of a Southern noontide, crowded with Court,
clergy, and people ; the sumptuous scene of Calderon
displayed ; God, saints and angels, heathen deities
and metaphysical abstractions, elements of nature and
deadly sins, brought into harmony and moulded to one
type of art by the artist's plastic touch. Altar candles
flared and guttered round the stage in the fierce heat
of the meridian sun, symbolising, as it were, the blend-
ing of diverse lights, the open life of man on earth,
and the dim religious mysteries of the sanctuary, the
night of pagan myths and the noon of Christian faith,
which genius had assembled and combined upon that
hieroglyphic of the world, the theatre.

As in Florence, so in Chester, special portions of
the sacred spectacle were consigned by old tradition
to each guild. Thus ' the good simple water-leaders
and drawers of Dee ' had the superintendence of the
Deluge and the Ark appropriately left to them. The
tanners, not perhaps without ironical reference to their
trade, exhibited the Fall of Lucifer; and the cooks
set forth the Harrowing of Hell. When the time
drew near, proclamation in the town was made, warn-
ing the several companies to be ready with their

112 Sl^AkSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

pageants. At Coventry this proclamation was spoken
by three Vexillatores or banner-bearers in speeches
which described the argument of each pageant. At
Chester it was termed the Banes or Banns. Our copy
of these Banes, dated in 1600, is interesting for the
apologetic tone in which it comments on the Miracles
to be exhibited. After mentioning that they were
written by one Don Rendall, the prologue proceeds :

This monk, monk-like, in Scriptures well seen.

In stories travailed with the best sort.

In pageants set forth apparently to all een

The Old and New Testament with lively comfort,

Intermingling therewith, only to make sport.

Some things not warranted by any writ,

Which to glad the hearers he would men to take it

It then compliments the monkish author on his good
digestion of the matter into twenty-four plays, and on
his boldness in bringing the sacred lore forth * in a com-
mon English tongue/ and finally begs the audience
not to judge the antique style of the performance too
harshly :

As all that shall see them shall most welcome be.
So all that hear them we most humbly pray
Not to compare this matter or story
With the age or time wherein we presently stay.
But in the time of ignorance wherein we did stray.

And again :

Go back, I say, to the first time again ;

Then shall you find the fine wit at this day abounding.

At that day and age had very small being.

Considering that Shakspere's plays were being brought
upon the London stage in 1600, this recommendation
to the audience was hardly superfluous.

THE AUDIENCE. 113

The expenses incurred by the city at these times of
festivity were doubtless considerable. Guild vied with
guild in bringing pageants forth with proper magnifi-
cence. It has been estimated that each show cost at
least 15/. In addition to the payment of the players,
there were various disbursements for apparel and stage
properties, carpentry, gilding ,upholstery, and painting.
We read of such items as the following :

Paid to the i)laycrs for rehearsal — Imprimis to God, ii^. viii//.

Item to Pilate his wife, \\s.

Paid to Fauston for cock-crowing, iii^.

Paid for mending Hell, ii^.

Item for j^ainting of Hell-mouth, iii^.

Item for setting World on fire, \d.

Yet town and trades were amply repaid by the con-
course which the plays drew. Lasting several days
and filling the hostelries with guests from all the coun-
try side, each celebration served the purpose of a fair.
Dugdale, the antiquary, in his notice of the Coventry
Miracles, writes as follows : ' I have been told by
some old people, who in their younger days were eye-
witnesses of these pageants so acted, that the yearly
confluence of people to see that show was extraordinary
great, and yielded no small advantage to this city.'
Gentles and yeomanry filled the neighbouring country
houses and farmsteads with friends for the occasion.
Thousands of people ; the motley crowd of medieval
days ; monks, palmers, merchants in their various
costumes, servants of noble families with badges on
their shoulders, hawkers of pardons and relics, pedlars,
artificers, grooms, foresters, hinds from the farm and
shepherds from the fells ; all known by special qualities

ti4 SMAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

of dress and bearing ; crowded the streets and thronged
the taverns. Comely women, like Chaucer s Wife of
Bath, made it their business to be present at some
favourable point of view. The windows and the
wooden galleries were hung- with carpets. Girls leaned
from latticed casements, and old men bent upon their
crutches in the doorways. In these circumstances, it is
not to be wondered at that Whitsuntide or Easter, when
the Miracles were played, became a season of debauch
and merry-making. A preacher of the fourteenth cen-
tury inveighs against them in no measured words on
this account. * To gather men together to buy their
victuals the dearer, and to stir men to gluttony and to
pride and boast, they play these Miracles, and to hold
fellowship of gluttony and lechery in such days of
Miracles playing, they beseen them before to more
greedily beguiling of their neighbours, in buying and
in selling ; and so this playing of Miracles nowadays
is very witness of hideous covetousness, that is mau-
metry.' ^ Similar complaints were made against the
Brethren of the Passion in Paris. The Hotel of
Burgundy, where they performed, was called ' that
sewer and house of Satan, whose actors, with shocking
abuse, term themselves the Brothers of the Passion of
Jesus Christ. That place is the scene of a thousand
scandalous assignations. It is the bane of virtue, the
destroyer of modesty, the ruin of poor families. Long
before the play begins, it is thronged with workmen,
who pass their time in uncouth jests, with cards and
dice, gormandising and drinking, from the which spring
many quarrels and assaults.'

^ Riliquia Aniiquct^ ii. 54, modernised.

STAGE AND PROPERTIES, 115

I do not seek to describe with any minuteness the
stage properties and dresses used in Miracles ; yet a few
details may be given, fit to place the reader at the
proper point of view for thinking of them. The man
who played God, wore a wig with gilded hair and had
his face gilt. Special apology is made at Chester
for the non-appearance of this personage on one
occasion ; and the reason assigned is, that this gilding
* disfigured the man.* How well founded the excuse
was, can be gathered from a contemporary account of
shows at Florence, where it is briefly said that the boy
who played the Genius of the Golden Age, with body
gilded for the purpose, died after the performance.
Christ wore a long sheepskin, such as early frescoes
and mosaics assign to the Good Shepherd. The Devil
appeared in orthodox costume of horns and tail, with
a fiery red beard to signify the place of flames in which
he dwelt. Judas Iscariot had also a wig of this colour ;
and it was common among German painters — witness
the * Last Supper ' by Holbein at Basel — to give this
colour, eminently disagreeable in a Jew, to the arch-
traitor. How Paradise was represented, we may per-
haps imagine to ourselves from the elaborate accounts
furnished by Vasari of the Ntivole at Florence. These
were frames of wood and iron wires, shaped like au-
reoles and covered with white wool, with sconces at
their sides for candles. The celestial personages sat
enshrined within these structures. Hell-mouth was a
vast pair of gaping jaws, armed with fangs, like a
sharks open swallow. Such representations of the
place of torment may be seen in the * Biblia Pauperum '
and 'Speculum Humanae Salvationis* and other books

I 2

ii6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

illustrated with early woodcuts, all of which throw
light upon the disposition of these medieval scenes.
Dragons, with eyes of polished steel ; scaly whales ;
asses that spoke ; a serpent to tempt Eve, with female
face and swingeing tail ; added bizarre variety to the
mere commonplace crowd of kings in gorgeous rai-
ment, flaming Herods, mailed soldiers, and hideous
uncouth ministers of torture. In the Coventry Mira-
cles, Death once appeared upon the stage in all the
horror of worm-eaten flesh and snake-enwrithed ribs,
as is manifest from the speech upon his exit. Adam
and Eve before the Fall, it may be said in passing,
were naked ; and we have the right to assume that
in the Doomsday some at any rate of the dead rose
naked from their graves.

VII.

Reading the Miracle Plays of Widkirk, Chester, and
Coventry, is not much better than trying to derive some
notion of a great masters etchings from a volume of
illustrative letter-press without the plates. The Miracles
'' were shows, pageants, spectacles presented to the eye ;
the words written to explain their tableaux and give mo-
tion to their figures, were in some sense the least part
of them. Modern students should take this fact into
account. Even the dramas of the greatest poets,
Sophocles or Shakspere, suffer when we read them in
the lifeless silence of our chamber. If this be so, how
little can we really judge the artistic effect of a Miracle
from the libretto which was merely meant to illustrate
a grand spectacular effect I After making due allow-

ARCHITECTURAL GRANDEUR. 117

ance for this inevitable drawback, after taking the
rudeness of the times into account, the undeveloped
state of language and the playwright's simple craft, we
shall be rather impressed with the colossal majesty and
massive strength of structure in these antique plays, v

than with their uncouth details. Each Miracle, viewed
in its entirety, displays the vigour and the large pro-
portions of a Gothic church. It is with the master
builder s skill that we must compare the writer's talent.
Judging by standards of accomplished beauty, we feel
that workmen and not artists in the highest sense of
the word carved the statues on the front of Wells
Cathedral and penned the dialogues of Chester. Art,
except in architecture, hardly existed among the na-
tions who produced the Mysteries and at the epoch of
their composition. The aesthetic creations of medieval
ingenuity, traceries in stone and beaten metal, illumi-
nated windows, wrought wood-work upon canopy and
stall, must always be regarded as subordinate to the
Cathedral, not as having any independent end as works
of art. The same is true of those vast compositions
which presented sacred history in shows beneath Cathe-
dral arches to the Christian laity. Poetry is here the
handmaid of religious teaching, the submissive drudge
of dogma. Language in the Miracles barely clothes
the ideas which were meant to be conveyed by figured
forms ; meagrely supplies the motives necessary for
the proper presentation of an action. Clumsy phrases,
quaint literalism, tedious homilies clog the dramatic
evolution. As in the case of medieval sculpture, so
here the most spontaneous and natural effects are
grotesque. In the treatment of sublime and solemn

ii8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

themes we may also trace a certain ponderous force, a
dignity analogous to that of fresco and mosaic. Sub-
jects which in themselves are vast, imaginative, and
capable of only a suggestive handling, such as the
Parliaments of Heaven and Hell, Creation, Judgment,
and the Resurrection from the dead, when conceived
with positive belief and represented with the crudest
realism, acquire a simple grandeur. Remote from the
conditions of our daily life, these mysteries express
themselves in fittest form by bare uncompromising
symbols. For this reason, there are not a few among
contemporary artists who will prefer a colossal Christ
in mosaic on the tribune of a Romanesque basilica to
a Christ by Raphael in transfigured ecstasy, a Last
Judgment sculptured by an unnamed artist on some
Gothic portal to the fleshly luxuriance of Rubens' or
the poised symmetry of Cornelius' design. It is rare
indeed to find instances of emancipated art so satis-
factory in such high themes as the * Creation of Adam'
by Michelangelo, or the 'Christ before Pilate' of
Tintoretto.

The literal translation of spiritual truths into cor-
poreal equivalents, which distinguished the medieval
religious sense — that positive and materialising habit
of mind which developed the belief in wonder-working
relics, the Corpus Christi miracle, the sensuous God
of the Host — lent a certain quaint sublimity to the
dramatic presentment of mysteries beyond the scope
of plastic art. But the same qualities degenerated
into unconditioned grossness, when the playwright
had to touch such topics as the Immaculate Conception
of our Lord. It is with a sense of wonder bordering

MIXTURE OF GROTESQUENESS. 119

upon disgust that we read the parts assigned to the
Holy Ghost and to Joseph in this episode. The same
material coarseness of imagination mars the aesthetical
effect of many passages, which might, according to our
present canons of taste, have been more profitably left
to such pantomimic presentation as a purely figurative
art affords. But this was not the instinct of those
times. The sacredness of the subject-matter banished
all thought of profanity. The end of edification justi-
fied the plainest realism of presentment. What was
believed to have actually taken place in the scheme
of man's redemption, that could lawfully and with
all reverence, however comically and grotesquely, be
exhibited.

Scenery and action rendered the bare poetry of the
Miracle-play imposing ; and we have every reason to
believe that both were adequate to their purpose. For
we must remember that the people who performed these
plays were the same folk who filled the casements of
our churches with stained glass, hung the chapel walls
with tapestries, carved the statues, and gilt the shrines.
They knew what was needed to bring their pageants
into harmony with edifices, not then as now vacant and
whitewashed, swept by depredators of the Reformation
period, garnished by churchwardens of the eighteenth
century, scrubbed and scraped and desolated by self-
styled restorers ; but glowing with deep and solemn hues
cast from clerestory windows, enriched with frescoes,
furnished with the multitudinous embellishments of art
expended on each detail of the structure by the loving
prodigality of pious hands. Little indeed is left to us
in England of that earlier architectural magnificence,

I20 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

when the Cathedral or the Abbey Church was a poem
without speech, perfected in every part with beauty, a
piece of stationary music sounding from symphonious
instalments, a storied illustration of the spiritual life of
Christendom, conveying through the medium of forms
and colours what the mind had not yet learned to frame
in rhythmic words. When a Miracle was shown in
such a building, it completed and enlivened the whole
scene. The religion, which appealed from every por-
tion of the edifice to the intellect through the senses,
now found ultimate expression in dramatic action.
The wooden scaffold, richly gilt and painted, cur-
tained with embroidered arras, and occupied by actors
in their parti-coloured raiment, shone like a jewelled
casket in the midst of altar-shrines and tabernacles,
statues and fretted arches, mellow with subtly tinted
arabesques. The character of the spectacle was deter-
mined not by the poetic genius of the monk who wrote
the words of the play, but by the unison of forms
and colours which prevailed throughout the edifice.
What the whole building strove to express in stationary
and substantial art, started for some hours into life
upon the stage.

The Passion Plays of Ammergau enable us at the
present time to understand the effect produced by
Miracles upon a medieval audience. Multitudes of men
and women derived their liveliest conceptions of sacred
history from those pageants. In countless breasts
those scenes excited profound emotions of awe, terror,
sympathy, and admiration. Nor was this influence, so
powerful in stimulating religious sentiment, without its
direct bearing on the arts. Painters of church walls,

RELATION TO MEDIEVAL ARTS. 121

stainers of choir windows, craftsmen in metal, stone,
and wood, received impressions which they afterwards
translated into form upon the Chapter House of Salis-
bury, the front of Lincoln, over the west porch of Reims,
in the choir stalls and the panels of a hundred churches.
The origins of art in medieval Europe reveal a common
impulse and a common method, which the study of
subsequent divergences renders doubly interesting and
suggestive. Between the bas-reliefs of the Pisani at
Orvieto, from which Michelangelo's frescoes of the
Creation descend in a direct line, and the mde work of
those English stone-cutters, before whom a female Eve
and a male Adam in the Miracles stood naked and
were not ashamed, we may trace a close resemblance,
proving how the same ideas took similar form in divers
nations. Plastic art and the religious drama acted and
reacted, each upon the other, through the period of
medieval incubation. Thus it is not too much to affirm
that the Mysteries contributed in an essential degree
to the development of figurative art in Europe. How
and in what specific details Miracles aided the evolu-
tion of the modern theatre in England, must now be
briefly investigated.

VHI.

The dramatic elements of the Miracles may suffi-
ciently, for present purposes, be classified under the
following titles : Tragic, Pathetic, Melodramatic, Idyllic,
Comic, Realistic, and Satiric. By reviewing these
with due brevity we shall be able to estimate on what
foundations in this medieval work of art the play-

122 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Wrights of the coming period built. But first it should
be plainly stated that the regular drama cannot be
regarded either as the exact successor in time, or as
the immediate offspring of religious plays. Those
plays continued to be acted until quite late in the
sixteenth century, at an epoch when English tragedy
and comedy were fully shaped ; nor is it reasonable to
suppose that the people would have abandoned the
custom of performing them except for changes in
religious feeling wrought by the Reformation, and for
changes in aesthetic taste effected by the Revival of

^ Learning. Contact with Italian culture, the study of
classical literature, and the larger instinct of humanity
developed by the Renaissance, determined both the
form and spirit of our drama. Still the medieval
Miracle bequeathed to the Elizabethan playwright
certain well-defined dramatic characters and situations,
a popular species of comedy, a plebeian type of melo-
drama, and, what is far more important, a widely
diffused intelligence of dramatic customs and con-

'^ ventions in the nation. The English people had
been educated by their medieval pageants for the
modern stage. The Miracles supplied those ante-
cedent conditions which rendered a national theatre
possible, and saved it from becoming what it mostly
was in Italy, a plaything of the Court and study. The
vast dogmatic fabric of the Miracle was abandoned,
like so many Abbey Churches, to decay and ruin.
The religious spirit which had animated medieval art,
was superseded by a new enthusiasm for humanity
and nature. But the comprehensive and colossal lines
on which that elder ruder work of art had been de-

TRAGIC AND PATHETIC ELEMENTS. 123

signed, were continued in the younger and more
artificial. The dramatic education of the people was
prolonged without intermission from the one period
into the other.

Of tragedy, in the highest and truest sense of the
word, we find but little in the Miracles. Many of the
situations, especially the Crucifixion and the Last
Judgment, are indeed eminently tragic. But the
writer has been content to leave them undeveloped,
trusting to the effect of the bare motives and their
presentation through the pageant. Having to deal
with matter of such paramount importance to every
Christian soul, he could hardly have used a more con-
sciously artistic method. In the Chester plays, how-
ever, the tragic opportunities of Doomsday are seized
upon with some skill. We are introduced to pairs of
representative personages standing upon either side of
Christ's throne and pleading at His judgment bar.
An emperor, a king, a queen, a pope, a judge, and a
merchant appear among the damned ; a pope, a king,
an emperor, a queen, among the saved. Devils answer
to angels. And over all the voice of Christ is heard,
arraigning the wicked for their ill deeds done on earth,
welcoming the good into the bliss of His society in
heaven. The playwright's talent is chiefly exhibited
in the elaborate but clear-cut portraiture of the bad .
folk, each of whom is made too late repentant, uttering
his own accusation with groans and unavailing tears.
We have before us such a scene as the painter of the
Last Judgment represented on the Campo Santo walls
at Pisa.

Pathos emerges into more artistic clearness, chiefly, >^

124 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

I think, because the situations whence it sprang put
less of strain upon the writers religious preconcep-
tions. In the old Italian Divozioni no pathetic
motive was more tragically wrought than Mary's
lamentation at the foot of the Cross. ^ And this is
managed with considerable, though far inferior, effect
by the author of the Coventry Mysteries. As in the
Italian * Corrotto,' Mary Magdalen brings the news :

V
Maria Magdalen,

I would fain tell, Lady, an I might for weeping,

For sooth, I^dy, to the Jews He is sold ;
With cords they have Him bound and have Him in keeping,

They Him beat spiteously, and have Him fast in hold.

Maria Vtrgo.

Ah ! ah ! ah ! how mine heart is cold !

Ah ! heart hard as stone, how mayst thou last ?
When these sorrowful tidings are thee told.

So would to God, heart, that thou mightest brast

Ah ! Jesu ! Jesu ! Jesu ! Jesu !

Why should ye suffer this tribulation and adversity ?
How may they find in their hearts you to pursue,

That never trespassed in no manner degree ?

For never thing but that was good thought ye.

Wherefore then should ye suffer this great pain ?
I suppose verily it is for the trespass of me,

And I wist that mine heart should cleave on twain.

The Magdalen herself is introduced, upon a pre-
vious occasion, for the first time to the audience before
the feet of Christ, uttering a prayer, which strikes me
in its simplicity as eminently pathetic :

* See my Renaissance in Italy^ vol. iv. p. 293, and the translation
of Jacopone's Corrotto in the Appendix.

MARY AND THE AfAGDALEN, 12$

As a cursed creature closed all in care,

And as a wicked wretch all wrapped in woe,
Of bliss was never no berde * so base.

As I myself that here now go.
Alas ! alas ! I shall forfare,^

For the great sins that I have do ;
Ixiss that my Lord God some deal spare,
And His great mercy receive me to.
Mary Magdalen is my name,
Now will I go to Christ Jesu ;
For He is the Lord of all virtue ;
And for some grace I think to sue,
For of myself I have great shame.

Ah ! mercy ! Lord ! and salve my sin ;
Maidens flower, thou wash me free ;
There was no woman of man his kin

So full of sin in no country.
I have befouled be fryth ' and fen.
And sought sin in many a city ;
But Thou me borrow,* Iw^rd, I shall brenne,*
With black fiends aye bowne ^ to be.
Wherefore, King of Grace,
With this ointment that is so soot,^
Let me anoint Thine holy foot,-
And for my bales thus win some boot.
And mercy, Lord, for my trespass.

Later on in the same Miracle, a part of striking
interest is assigned to Magdalen, when she goes alone
to the grave of Christ, and relates her sorrows to the
gardener, who turns and looks upon her uttering the
one word * Maria ! '

The scene in which pathos is most highly wrought
with a deliberate dramatic purpose, is the sacrifice of
Isaac in the Chester Plays :

* Berde — damsel. ^ Brenne—hnm,

* For/are perish. * Bowne — ready.
' Fryth — wood. ^ Soot — sweet.

"* Borrow or Bonue — ransom.

126 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Isaac.

Father, tell me, or I go.
Whether I shall be harmed or no.

Abraham.

Ah, dear God, that me is woe !
Thou breaks my heart in sunder.

Isaac.

Father, tell me of this case.
Why you your sword drawn has,
And bears it naked in this place ;
Thereof I have great wonder.

Abraham.

Isaac, son, peace, I thee pray ;
Thou breaks my heart in tway.

Isaac.

I pray you, father, lean * nothing from me.
But tell me what you think.

Abraham.
Ah, Isaac, Isaac ! I must thee kill !

Isaac.

Alas ! father, is that your will,
Your own child for to spill
Upon this hiirs brink ?
If I have trespassed in any degree.
With a yard you may beat me ;
Put up your sword, if your will be,
For I am but a child.

Abraham.

O my dear son, I am sorry
To do to thee this great annoy.
God's commandment do must I ;
His works are ever full mild.

* Lean — conceal.

SACRIFICE OF ISAAC, 127

Isaac,

Would God my mother were here with me ! '
She would kneel down upon her knee,
Praying you, father, if it may be,
For to save my life.

Abraham,

O, comely creature, but I thee kill,
I grieve my God, and that full ill.

Abraham then explains how God has commanded
him to slay his son ; and Isaac, when he fully com-
prehends, is ready for the sacrifice :

Isaac,

But yet you must do God*s bidding.
Father, tell my mother for nothing.

\Herc Abraham wrings his hands^ and saith .]

Abraham,

For sorrow I may my hands wring ;

Thy mother I cannot please.

Ho ! Isaac, Isaac, blessed must thou be !

Almost my wit I lose for thee ;

The blood of thy body so free

I am full loth to shed.

[Ilere Isaac asking his father blessing on his knees^ and saith .•]

Isaac.

Father, seeing you must needs do so.
Let it pass lightly, and over go ;
Kneeling on my knees two.
Your blessing on me spread.
Father, I pray you hide my een.
That I see not the sword so keen ;
Your stroke, father, would I not see,
Lest I against it grill.

The scene is prolonged for several speeches, Abra-
ham's determination being almost overcome and his

128 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Will weakened by the boy s meekness. At last, Isaac
is bound upon the altar :

Father, greet well my brethren young.
And pray my mother of her blessing ;
I come no more under her wing ;
Farewell for ever and aye !
But, father, I cry you mercy
For all that ever I have trespassed to thee,
Forgiven, father, that it may be
Until doom's day.

Then Abraham kisses his son and binds a scarf
about his head. Isaac kneels, and while Abraham is
getting his sword ready for the stroke, he says :

I pray you, father, turn down my face
A little, while you have space.
For I am full sore adread.

At this turn of the action, the Angel appears and
shows Abraham the ram in the thicket, while the
Expositor, who in the Chester Miracle comments on
situations involving doctrine, explains to the audience
how Isaac is a type of Christ.

Melodrama of a ranting and roaring type, as dis-
tinguished from tragedy or pathos, had a very promi-
nent and popular place assigned to it in the character of
Herod. The Shaksperian expression * to out- Herod
Herod ' indicates the extravagance with which this part
was played, in order to please the groundlings and make
sport A large sword formed part of his necessary
equipage, which he is ordered in the stage directions to
* cast up ' and ' cast down.' He was also attended by a
boy wielding a bladder tied to a stick, whose duty was
probably to stir him up and prevent his rage from
flagging. In the Coventry Miracle this melodramatic

MELODRAMA AND COMEDY. 129

element is elaborated with real force in the banquet
scene which follows the Massacre of the Innocents.
Herod appears throned and feasting among his knights,
boasting truculently of his empire, and listening to their
savage jests upon the slaughtered children. Then
Death enters unperceiveS except by the spectators,
and strikes Herod down in the midst of his riot;
whereupon the Devil springs upon the stage, and
carries off the King with two of his Knights to Hell.
If Herod supplied melodrama, the Devil furnished
abundance of low comedy and grotesque humour. His
first appearance as Lucifer in the Parliament of Hea-
ven shows him a proud rebellious Seraph. While the
angels are singing Sanctus to God upon His throne, he
suddenly starts forth and interrupts their chorus :^

To whose worship sing ye this song ?

To worship God or reverence me ?
l>ut ye me worship, ye do me wrong ;

For I am the worthiest that ever may be.

On this note Lucifer continues, not without dignity,
defying God, menacing the loyal angels, and drawing
to his side the rebels. But when the word, expelling
him from heaven, is spoken, his form changes, and his
language takes a baser tone. His companions rush
grovelling and cursing one another to the mouth of
hell, howling, ' Out harrow ! ' and * Ho ! Ho ! ' ^ — the
cries with which, when devils came upon the stage,
they always advertised their entrance. When Satan
reappears, he has lost all his former state and beauty.
He is henceforth the hideous, deformed, and obscene
fiend of medieval fancy. One of his speeches may

^ Coventry Plays. * Chester Plays.

I30 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

suffice for a specimen. After the Fall, God curses him
again in the shape of the serpent, and he answers : ^

At Thy bidding, foul I fall ;

I creep home to my stinking stall ;

Hell-pit and heaven-hall

Shall do Thy bidding boon.
I fall down here a foul freke ; ^
For this fall I gin to quake ;
With a fart my breech I break ;

My sorrow cometh full soon.

It was customary for the Devil to disappear thus with an
unclean gesture. In addition to Satan, Beelzebub and
Belial are personified ; and in the Widkirk Plays a sub-
ordinate fiend named Tutivillus, who was destined to
play a popular part in the Moralities, appears upon the
scene of Doomsday.

IX.

Another kind of comedy, less fantastically gro-
tesque, but far grosser to our modern apprehension,
arose from the relations between Joseph and his wife,
the Virgin Mother of our Lord. The real object of
those monkish playwrights was to bring the miraculous
and immaculate conception of Christ into clear relief.
But they wrote as though they wanted to insist on
what is coarse and disagreeable in the situation. Joseph
is depicted as superfluously old, unwilling to wed, and
conscious of marital incapacity. Mary professes her
intention of leading a religious life in celibacy. Wed-
lock is thrust upon the pair by an unmistakable sign
from heaven that they are appointed unto matrimony.

' Coventry Plays. ^^ /vy/^^— fellow.

JOSEPH AND MARY, 131

Listen to Joseph before he is dragged forth to offer up
his wand :

Benedicite ! I cannot understand

WTiat our Prince of Priests doth mean,
That every man should come and bring with him a wand,

Able to be married ; that is not I ; so mote I then !

I have been maiden ever, and ever more will ben ;
I changed not yet of all my long life ;

And now to be married, some man would wen
It is a strange thing an old man to take a young wife !

Soon after the wedding, Joseph leaves his bride ; and
when he returns, he finds to his dismay that she has
conceived a child :

That seemeth evil, I am afraid.

Thy womb too high doth stand.
I dread me sore I am betrayed.

Some other man thee had in hand
Hence sith that I went.

Mary tells him the truth. But he can naturally not
believe her.

God's child 1 Thou liest, ifay !
God did never jape so with may.
Alas ! alas ! my name is shent !
All men may me now despise.
And say, * Old cuckold, thy bow is bent
Newly now after the French guise ! *

Mary repeats her story of the angel. This rouses
Joseph's wrath.

An angel 1 Alas, alas ! Fie for shame !

Ye sin now in that ye do say,
To putten an angel in so great blame.

Alas, alas ! let be, do way !
It was some boy began this game.

That clothed was clean and gay ;
And ye give him now an angel's name —

Alas, alas, and well away !

After Joseph has been satisfied by the descent of
Gabriel from heaven confirming Mary s narrative, the

K 3

132 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

situation is not dropped. It seemed necessary to the
monkish scribe that he should drive the doctrine of
the Incarnation home into the thickest skull by further
evidence. Therefore he devised a scene in which
Mary is arraigned for incontinence before the Bishop s
Court by two detractors or false witnesses. Of their
foul language and scurrilous insinuations no special
account need here be taken, except it be to point out
that they dwell on Joseph's age, and make merry with
the common fate of old men married to young brides.
/ The suit is decided by the ordeal of a potent drink of

which Mary and Joseph both partake without injury,
while the false witnesses, who are also obliged to taste
the cup, fall down astonied and distraught :

Out, out, alas ! What aileth my skull ?

Ah, mine head with fire methinketh is brent !

Mercy, good Mary ! I do me repent
Of my cursed and false language.

To our notions, Noah's wife was a better butt than
Mary's husband for this comic badinage. And in the
Chester Pageant of the Deluge this personage is made
to furnish forth much fun. Early in the scene, she
declares her intention of not entering the Ark at all.
At any rate, nothing shall induce her to do so until she
has made merry with her gossips, and taken a good
sup of wine. Then, if she may bring them with her,
she will think about it. All the beasts and fowls have
been already packed away, when this dialogue between
the patriarch and his wife opens :

Noye,

Wife, come in : why stands thou there ?
Thou art ever froward, I dare well swear.
Come in, on God's name ! Half time it were,
For fear lest that we drown.

NOAirS WIFE. 133

Noye's Wife.

Yea, sir, set up your sail,
And row forth with evil hail,
For withoutcn fail

I will not out of this town ;
But I have my gossips everyone.
One foot further I will not gone :
They shall not drown, by Saint John,

An I may save their life.
They loven me full well, by Christ !
But thou let them into thy chest,
Els row now where thy list,

And get thee a new wife !

Noye.

Sem, son, lo ! thy mother is wrawe ;
By God, such another I do not know.

Sem.

Father, I shall fetch her in, I trow,

Withouten any fail.
Mother, my father after thee send.
And bids thee into yonder ship wend.
Look up and see the wind ;

For we be ready to sail.

Noy^s Wife.

Sem, go again to him, I say ;
I will not come therein to-day.

Noye.

Come in, wife, in twenty devils' way !
Or else stand there all day.

Cam.
Shall we all fetch her in ?

Noye.

Yea, sons, in Christ's blessing and mine *
I would you hied you betime ;
For of this flood I am in doubt.

134 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

The Good Gossippes' Son^.

The flood comes flitting in full fast,

On every side that spreads full far ;

For fear of drowning I am aghast ;

Good gossips, let us draw nere.

And let us drink or we depart,

For oft times we have done so ;

For at a draught thou drinks a quart,

And so will I do or I go.

Here is a pottel full of Malmsey good and strong ;

It will rejoice both heart and tongue.

Though Noye think us never so long,

Here we will drink alike.

At length, after much further beseeching on the part
of Noah and his sons, and bargaining upon her side,
Noah's wife with all her gossips is bundled into the
Ark, and the Deluge begins in good earnest.

The Nativity gave occasion for blending comic and
idyllic motives in a very graceful combination. The
pure and beautiful narrative of S. Luke s Gospel, with
its romantic suggestion of the shepherd folk awaked by
angels on the hills of Bethlehem to gaze upon Christ's
star, touched the imagination of all Christendom. It
brought heaven into contact with the simplest form of
rural industry; invested pastoral life with sacred poetry ;
and dedicated the Divine Infant in His cradle of the
manger to the sympathy of those rude watchers on the
fells and uplands. Therefore we find that the Presepio
of Umbrian devotion, the Pifferari of Rome and Naples,
the musette-players of France, the Christmas music of
Bach and Handel, the Noels and the carols of all
Northern nations, have yielded a continuous succession
of the rarest and most quaintly touching passages in
Christian art. In the first rank with these productions
we may reckon the pastoral scenes in our religious

THE NATIVITY, 135

drama. Two of these deserve especial comment
The first is a celebrated episode in the Widkirk
Miracles, which forms a comedy of rustic life complete
in all its parts, and turns upon the jovial humours of
one shepherd Mak, who steals a sheep from his com-
panions, and conceals it in his cottage as the new-born
baby of his wife. This little piece, detached from the
action of the Miracle, rightly deserves the name of
interlude, and proves that independent comedy had a
very early existence in England. Still and Udall, the
first writers of regular comedy in our language, had
little more to do than to develop similar motives and
work upon the lines of this original. The Chester
Plays contain a piece of less dramatic importance, but
which is equally interesting for its realistic delineation
of rural habits. The name of the comic characters in
this Nativity arc Harvey, Tudd, and Trowle, who
occupy the night, before the shining of the angel, with
rude jokes and vauntings of their pastoral craft Their
discussion of Gabriers message, * Gloria in excelsis,' &c.
is marked by a racy sense of what such seely shepherds
may have gathered from an angel's song. Quoth one :

What song was this, say ye,
That they sang to us all three ?
Expounded shall it be,

Or we hence pass.
For I am eldest of degree,
And also best, as seemes me.
It was glore glare with a glee ;

It was neither more nor less.

Trowle, who is the comic personage par excellmce,
replies :

Nay, it was glori, glory, glorious \
Methought that note ran over the house.

136 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

A seemly man he was and curious ;
But soon away he was.

Another shepherd answers Trowie :

Nay, it was glory, glory, with a glo !
And much of celsis was thereto :
As ever I have rest or roo,
Much he spake of glass.

It may parenthetically be observed that the painters
and glaziers of Chester presented this pageant. There-
fore the allusion in the last line to their trade may have
been meant to move mirth. After bandying their conjec-
tures to and fro, the shepherds rise and wend their way
to the stable in Bethlehem, where they find Christ new-
bom, and worship Him with various simple prayers and
offerings :

Hail, King of heaven so high !

Bom in a crib !

Mankind unto Thee

Thou hast made fully.

Hail, King ! born in a maiden's bower !

Prophets did tell Thou shouldst bear succour.

Thus clerks doth say.

Lo, I bring Thee a bell.

I pray Thee save me from hell,

So that I may with Thee dwell

And serve Thee for aye.

When it comes to the turn of Trowie, that incorrigible
jester, he has no gift to make but ' a pair of my wife's
old hose.' But this crude note, no sooner than struck,
is resolved in a really charming quartett of boys, who
approach the infant, each with a gift suitable to his
own poor estate :

The First Boy.

Now, Lord, for to give Thee have I nothing ;
Neither gold, silver, brooch, nor ring.

PASTORAL INTERLUDES. 137

Nor no rich robes meet for a king,

That have I here in store.
But that it lacks a stoppel,
Take Thee here my fair bottle,
For it ^ill hold a good pottle :

In faith I can give Thee no more.

ITie Third Boy,

O noble child of Thee !
Alas, what have I for Thee

Save only my pipe ?
Else truely nothing.
Were I in the rocks or in

I could make this pij^e,
That all the woods should ring
And quiver, as it were.

The Fourth Boy.

Now, Child, although Thou be comen from God,
And be God Thyself in Thy manhood.
Yet I know that in Thy childhood

Thou wilt for sweet meat look ;
To pull down apples, pears, and plums ;
Old Joseph shall not need to hurt his thumbs.
Because Thou hast not plenty of crumbs ;

I give Thee here my nut-hook.

Passages of realistic delineation may be culled pretty
copiously from all the Miracles. The eldest, those of
Widkirk, for example, introduce a dialogue between
Cain and his Gar^on, curiously illustrative of vulgar
boorish life. An episode of dicers in the Crucifixion of
the same series forms a short interlude detached from
the chief action. In the Chester Plays the dishonest
alewife, who abides with the Devils, after Hell has been
harrowed and Michael has sung Te Deum, and who is

138 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

welcomed with effusion by Satan and his crew, supplies
the motive of what is practically a brief comic farce.
A more distinct satiric aim is traceable in some parts of
the Coventry Plays — for instance, in the monologue of
the ' Great Duke of Hell,' who comes upon the stage in
the fashionable costume of a Court gallant, and reads a
homily upon the modern modes of sinning ;^ also in the
curious interpolated pageant of the Assumption, which
abounds in allusions to reformers and heretics, and is
written in a harsh, coarse, controversial style, combined
with much vulgarity of abuse. The introduction to
the 14th Pageant of the Coventry series is a satire,
the point of which has, I think, been missed by both
Halliwell in his edition of these plays and Collier in his
commentary on them. The Bishops Court is about
to be opened for the trial of Mary accused of incon-
tinence. An usher enters, and makes proclamation :

Avoid, sirs, and let my lord the Bishop come,

And sit in the court the laws for to do ;
And I shall go in this place them for to summon ;

Those that be in my book, the court ye must come to.

He then reads out a list of names, obviously meant
to indicate parishioners over whom the Bishop s Court
had jurisdiction for sins of the flesh. They run in
pairs mostly, men and women, as thus :

Cook Crane and Davy Drydust,
Lucy Liar and Lettice Littletrust,
Miles the Miller and CoUe Crakecrust,
Both Bett the Baker and Robin Reed.

Lastly, having summoned these evil livers, he bids
them put money in their purse, lest their cause fare ill

* Pageant 25.

SATIRE, 139

in the Bishop's Court — a warning similar to that we
find in Mapes's rhymes upon the Roman Curia :

And look yc ring well in your purse,
For else your cause may speed the worse.

Both H alii well and Collier interpret this passage to
mean that entrance fees were paid at exhibitions of
the pageants. This, however, is inconsistent with the
whole tenor of the proclamation, and is quite in con-
tradiction with the last words of the usher :

Though that ye sling God's curse
Even at mine head, fast come away :

where it is clear that the fellow is not inviting spectators
to a show, but making believe to summon unwilling
folk before the justice.

I shall close these remarks with yet another scene
of dramatic realism, chosen from the Coventry Plays.
It occurs in the Pageant of the Woman taken in
Adultery. A Scribe and a Pharisee are consulting
how they may entrap Christ, and bring Him to con-
fusion. A third person, who is styled Accusator, sug-
gests that they should present Him with the puzzling
case of a woman detected in the act of sin :

A fair young quean here by doth dwell.

Both fresh and gay upon to look ;
And a tall man with her doth mell :

The way into her chamber right even he took.

Let us there now go straight thither ;

The way full even I shall you lead ;
And we shall take them both together,

While that they do that sinful deed.

The Pharisee and Scribe assent. The Accuser leads
them to the house. They break open the door, and

I40 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

the tall man comes rushing out, pursued by the three
witnesses. The stage direction runs as follows :

[Hie j'uvenis quidam extra eurrit in diploide^ ealigis non ligatis, et
braecas in manu tenens, et dicit Accusator.]

Accusator.

Stow that harlot, some earthly wight !
That in advowtry here is found !

yuvenis.

If any man stow me this night,

I shall him give a deadly wound.
If any man my way doth stop,

Or we depart dead shall I be ;
I shall this dagger put in his crop ;

I shall him kill or he shall me !

Pliarisee,

Great God his curse may go with thee !
With such a shrew will I not mell.

yuvenis.

That same blessing I give you three.
And queath you all to the devil of hell.

[Turning to the audience ^ andshmuing tJum in what a plight he stands.]

In faith I was so sore afraid

Of yon three shrews, the sooth to say,
My breech be not yet well up tied,

I had such haste to run away :
They shall never catch me in such affray —

I am full glad that I am gone.
Adieu, adieu ! a twenty devils' way !

And God his curse have ye everyone !

What follows, when the Scribe, the Pharisee, and
the Accuser drag the woman forth, is too foul-mouthed
for quotation. It proves that the monkish author of the
text shrank from nothing which could make his point
clear, or could furnish sport to the spectators. The scene

IVOMA.V TAKEN IN ADULTERY, 141

acquires dignity as it proceeds. Christ writes in silence
with His finger on the sand, while the three witnesses
utter voluble invective, ply Him with citations from the
law of Moses, and taunt Him with inability to answer.
At last He lifts His head and speaks :

Jesus,

Look which of you that never sin wrought,

But is of life cleaner than she,
Cast at her stones and spare her nought,

Clean out of sin if that ye be.

\Hic Jesus itcrum sc inclinans scribet in terra ^ ei omnes accusatores
t/uasi confusi separatim in tribus locis se disjungenf,^

Pharisee,

Alas, alas ! I am ashamed.

I am afeard that I shall die.
All mine sins even properly named

Yon prophet did write before mine eye.
If that my fellows that did espy,

They will tell it both far and wide ;
My sinful living if they out cry,

I wot never where mine head to hide !

The same effect is produced on the other witnesses
by Christ's mystic writing in the sand. They slink
away, abashed or silenced, while the woman makes
confession and receives absolution :

When man is contrite, and hath won grace,
God will not keep old wrath in mind ;

But better love to them He has,
Very contrite when He them find.

Some reflections are forced upon the mind by the
mixture of comedy with sacred things in these old
plays, and by their gross material realism. In order to
comprehend what strikes a modern student as profanity,
we must place ourselves at the medieval point of view.
The Northern races who adopted Christianity, delighted

142 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in grotesqueness. The broad hilarity of their Yule
^^ rites and festivals added mirth to Christmas. To
separate the indulgence of this taste for humour from
religion, would have been impossible ; because religion
was the fullest expression of their life, absorbing all
their intellectual energies. The Cathedral, which em-
bodied the highest spiritual aspirations in a monu-
mental work of art, admitted grotesquery in details
and flung wide its gate at certain seasons to buffoonery.
Grinning gargoils, monstrous Lombard centaurs, mer-
maids clasped with men, indecent miserere stalls,
festivals of Fools and Asses, burlesque Masses per-
formed by boy-bishops, travesties of holiest rites
did not offend, as it would seem, the sense of men who
reared the spire of Salisbury, who carved the portals
of Chartres, who glazed the chancel windows of Le
Mans, who struck the unison of arch and curve and
column, and could span in thought the vacant air with
aisles more bowery than forest glades. We, in this later
age of colder piety and half-extinguished art, explore
the relics of the past, scrutinise and ponder, classify
and criticise. It is hardly given to us to understand
the harmony of parts apparently so diverse. It shocks
our taste to dwell on coarseness and religion blent in
one consistent whole. We forget that the artists we
admire — our masters in design how unapproachably
beyond the reach of modern genius ! — lived their whole
lives out in what they wrought. For those folk, so
simple in their mental state, so positive in their belief,
it was both right and natural that the ludicrous and
even the unclean should find a place in art and in
religious mysteries.

PARALLELS IN PLASTIC ART, 143

As a last word on the subject of Miracle Plays,
I may suggest that those who are curious to form an
adequate conception of the pageants as they were
performed, should pay a visit to the Sacro Monte at
Varallo. There, on the broad flat summit of a rocky
hill some thousand feet above the valley of the Sesia,
is a sanctuary surrounded with numberless chapels
embowered in chestnut woods. Each chapel contains
a scene from sacred history, expressed by figures of
life size, vividly painted, and accompanied with simple
scenery in fresco on the walls. The whole series sets
forth the life of Christ with special reference to the
Passion. Architecture, plastic groups and wall-paint-
ings date alike from a period in the middle of the
sixteenth century, and are the work of no mean crafts-
men. The great Gaudenzio Ferrari plied his brush
there together with painters of Luini's school. But
the method of treatment, particularly in episodes of
vehement emotion, such as the Massacre of the Inno-
cents, the Flagellation, and the Crucifixion, indicates
antique tradition. Designed for the people who crowd
this festival in summer time on pilgrimage from all
the neighbouring hill-country and cities of the plain,
they are no finished masterpieces of Renaissance art,
but simply realistic pageants bringing facts with rude
dramatic force before the eyes. It seems to me im-
possible to approach the Miracles, as they were pro-
bably exhibited in Coventry and Chester, more closely
than on this Holy Mountain, where the popular art of
the sixteenth century is still in close relation with the
religious sentiments of a rustic population.

144 SHAICSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

CHAPTER IV.

MORAL PLAYS.

I. Development of Minor Religious Plays from the Cyclical Miracle —
Intermediate Forms between Miracle and Drama — Allegory and Per-
sonification.— H. Allegories in the Miracle — Detached from the
Miracle — Medieval Contrasti^ Dialogic and Disptttationes — Emergence
of the Morality — Its essentially Transitional Character. — III. Stock
Personages in Moral Plays — Devil and Vice— The Vice and the
Clown. — IV. Stock Argument — Protestant and Catholic—* Mundus et
Infans.' —V. The * Castle of Perseverance' — * Lusty Juventus* — *Youth.'
— VI. *Hick Scomer' — A real Person introduced — * New Custom* —
* Trial of Treasure '—* Like will to Like.'— VII. * Everyman '—The
Allegorical Importance of this Piece. — VIII. Moral Plays with an
Attempt at Plot — * Marriage of Wit and Wisdom ' — * Marriage of Wit
and Science* — *The Four Elements * — *Microcosmus.*— IX. Advance
in Dramatic Quality—* The Nice Wanton'— *The Disobedient Child.'
— X. How Moral Plays were Acted — Passage from the old Play of
*Sir Thomas More.' — XI. Hybrids between Moral Plays and Drama —
*King Johan' — Mixture of History and Allegory — The Vice in * Appius
and Virginia' — In * Cambyses.'

(N.B. The majority of the Plays discussed in this chapter will be
found in Hazlitt's Dodsley^ vols. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.)

The examples already given of humorous passages
occurring in the Miracles, suffice to prove that comedy
was ready to detach itself from the religious drama,
and to assert its independence. But other causes had
to operate, and a whole phase of evolution had to
be accomplished before the emancipation of tragedy,
that far more highly organised artistic form, could be
efifectecl. In proportion as the Miracles passed more

MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY, 145

and more into the hands of laymen, and characters
like Herod or Pilate acquired greater prominence, the
transition from the Cyclical Mystery to an intermediate
type, out of which the serious drama of History and
Tragedy ultimately emerged, was rendered gradually
possible. Sacred plays with titles like the following,
' Godly Queen Esther,' ' King Darius,' ' The Conver-
sion of Saul,' * Mary Magdalen,' show the tendency to
select some episode of Biblical history for separate
treatment, and while maintaining the conventional
structure of the Miracle, to concentrate interest on
some single personage. In the Cyclical Miracle, the
human race itself had been the protagonist, and the
action was commensurate with the whole scheme of
man's salvation. In these minor Miracles one man or
woman emerged into distinctness, and the dramatic
action was determined by the character and deeds
of the selected hero.

It was not possible, however, for the art to free
itself upon these simple lines. Instruction had been
the chief end of the sacred play, and to this purpose
the drama still clung in its passage toward liberty.
Allegory and personification supplied the necessary
intermediate form. We have only to remember what
a commanding part was played by Allegory through the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all over Europe — in
the Divine Comedy of Dante, in Giotto's painting and
Orcagna's sculpture, in the French Romance of the
Rose, in the mysticism of the German Parzival, in
the Vision of our English Ploughman — in order to
comprehend the reasons why this step was inevitable,
and why the type determined by it for the drama was

146 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

not then without attraction. Three centuries of mili-
tant and triumphant humanism, of developed art, and
of advancing science have rendered allegory irksome
to the modem mind. We recognise its essential
imperfection, and are hardly able to do justice to such
merits as it undoubtedly possessed for people not yet
accustomed to distinguish thought from figured modes
of presentation. It is our duty, if we care to under-
stand the last phase of medieval culture, to throw
ourselves back into the mental condition of men who
demanded that abstractions should be clothed for them
by art in visible shapes — men penetrated in good
earnest with the Realism of the Schools, and to whom
the genders of the Latin Grammar suggested sexes —
men who delighted in the ingenuity and grotesquery of
what to us is little better than a system of illustrated
conundrums ; for whom a Prudence with two faces or a
Charity crowned with flames seemed no less natural
than Gabriel kneeling with his lily at the Virgin's
footstool — men who naturally thought their deepest
thoughts out into tangibilities by means of allegorical
mythology.

II.

The Miracles in England had already brought
personifications upon the stage. In the Coventry
Plays, Justice, Mercy, Truth, and Peace hold con-
ference with the three Persons of the Trinity.
Death strikes Herod down among his knights. Con-
templation acts the part of hierophant, explaining
mysteries of faith. Medieval literature, moreover,

PERSONIFIED ABSTRACTIONS. 147

abounded in debates and dialogues between abstrac-
tions. From the Latin poems attributed to Walter
Mapes in England, we might quote a ' Disputatio inter
Corpus et Animam/ and a ' Dialogus inter Aquam et
Vinum.' The Italian Contrastiy some of which, like
the ' Commedia deir Anima,' are undoubtedly of great
antiquity, bring the scheme of human destiny before
us under the form of personified abstractions con-
versing and disputing. To take a further step ; to
detach the element of allegory already extant in ^
the Miracles from the framework in which it was
embedded, and to combine this dramatic element with
the moral disputations of scholastic literature, was both ^
natural and easy. This step was taken at a compara-
tively early period. Moral plays, extant in MS., have
been ascribed to the reign of Henry VI. In the reign
of Henry VII. they were both popular and fashionable,
and they kept their vogue through that of his successor,
increasing in complexity. The artistic type which
resulted from this process made no unreasonable de-
mands upon the imagination of a laity imbued with
allegorical conceptions, and accustomed by the plastic
arts to figurative renderings of abstract notions. Yet
the defect adherent to all allegory in poetic art renders
these figures ineffective. Intended for the stage, they
strike us as being even more ineffective than they might
have been in a poem meant to be perused. This defect
may be plainly stated. According to the allegorical
method, persons are created to stand for qualities, which
qualities in all living human beings are blent with other
and modifying moral ingredients. Being qualities iso-
lated by a process of abstraction and incarnated by

L 3

148 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

a process of reflective art, brought into aesthetical
existence in order to symbolise and present single facets
of character, they cannot delude us into taking them for
personalities. They fail to attain concrete reality or
, to convey forcible lessons in human ethics. How cold
and lifeless, for example, are the struggles of Juven-
tus between Pity and Abominable Living, matched
with the real conflict of a young man trained in piety,
but tempted by a woman !

It was thus that the Morality came into existence :
an intermediate form of dramatic art which had less
vogue in England than in France, and which preserves
at this time only a faint antiquarian interest. To touch
lightly upon its main features will serve the purpose of
a work which aims at literary criticism rather than at
scientific history. The chief point to be insisted on is
the emergence through Moralities of true dramatic
^ types of character into distinctness. The Morality
must, for our present purpose, be regarded as the
schoolmaster which brought our drama to self-con-
sciousness. It has the aridity and mortal dullness
proper to merely transitional and abortive products.
The growth of a brief moment in the evolution of the
modern mind, representing the passage from medieval-
ism to the Renaissance, from Catholic to humanistic
art, this species bore within itself the certainty of short
duration, and suffered all the disabilities and awkward-
nesses of a temporary makeshift. We might compare it
to one of those imperfect organisms which have long
since perished in the struggle for existence, but which
interest the physiologist both as indicating an effort
after development upon a line which proved to be the

CHARACTERS OF THE MORALITIES. 149

weaker, and also as containing within itself evidences of
the structure which finally succeeded. This compari-
son, even though it be not scientifically correct, will
serve to explain the nature of the Morality, which can
hardly be said to lie in the direct line of evolution
between the Miracle and the legitimate Drama, but
rather to be an abortive side-effort, which was destined
to bear barren fruit

III.

Let us pass the actors in a prefatory review. From
their names we shall learn something of the drama
which they constituted. Perseverance, Science, Mun-
dus, Wit, Free-will, the Five Senses reduced to one
spokesman. Sensual Appetite, Imagination, a Taverner,
Luxuria, Conscience, Innocency, Mischief, Nought,
Nowadays, Abominable Living, Ignorance, Irksome-
ness, Tutivillus, the Seven Vices, Anima, Gar9io (figur-
ing Young England), Humanum Genus, Pity, Every-
man, Honest Recreation — such are some of the strange
actors in these moral shows. Abstract terms are per-
sonified and quaintly jumbled up with more familiar
characters emergent from the people of the times. An
effort is clearly being made to realise dramatic types,
which after trial in this shape of metaphysical entities,
will take their place as men and women animated by
controlling humours, when the stage becomes a mirror
of man's actual life. For the present period the stage
has ceased to be the mirror of God's dealings with the
human race in the scheme of creation, redemption, and
judgment. It has not yet accustomed itself to reflect
true men and women as they have been, are, and will

I50 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

be for all time. This intermediate dramatic form is
satisfied with bodying forth the figments of the mind.
It reflects logical generalities in the mirror of its art,
investing these with outward form and allegorical im-
personation.

Prominent among this motley company of abstract
characters moved the Devil, leaping upon the stage
dressed like a bear, and shouting ' Ho ! Ho ! ' and
'Out Harrow!' His frequent but not inseparable
comrade was the Vice — that tricksy incarnation of the
wickedness which takes all shapes, and whose fantastic
feats secure a kind of sympathy. The Vice was un-
known in the English Miracles, and played no marked
part in the French Moralities. He appears to have
been a native growth, peculiar to the transitional epoch
of our moral interludes. By gradual deterioration or
amelioration, he passed at length into the Fool or
Clown of Shakspere's Comedy. But at the moment
of which we are now treating, the Vice was a more con-
siderable personage. He represented that element of
evil which is inseparable from human nature. Viewed
from one side he was eminently comic ; and his pranks
cast a gleam of merriment across the dullness of the
scenes through which he hovered with the lightness of
a Harlequin. Like Harlequin, he wore a vizor and
carried a lathe sword. It was part of his business to
belabour the Devil with this sword ; but when the
piece was over, after stirring the laughter of the people
by his jests, and heaping mischief upon mischief in the
heart of man, nothing was left for the Vice but to
dance down to Hell upon the Devil's back. The
names of the Vice are as various as the characters

THE VICE. 151

which he assumed, and a3 the nature of the play re-
quired. At root he remains invariably the same — a
flippant and persistent elf of evil, natural to man.
Here are some of his titles, taken from the scenes
in which he figures : Iniquity, Hypocrisy, Infidelity,
Hardydardy, Nichol Newfangle, Inclination, Ambi-
dexter, Sin, Desire, Haphazard. The names, it will
be noticed, vary according as the play is more or
less allegorical, and according to the special com-
plexion of human frailty which the author sought to
represent

The part of the Vice was by far the most original
feature of the Moralities, and left a lasting impression
upon the memory of English folk long after it had
disappeared from the stage. The Clown in * Twelfth
Night' sings :

I am gone, sir ;

And anon, sir,
I '11 be with you again,

In a trice,

Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain ;
Who, with dagger of lath.
In his rage and his wrath.

Cries Ah, ha ! to the Devil :
Like a mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad ;

Adieu, goodman drivel.

Ben Jonson, who preserved so much of old stage
learning and tradition in the introductions to his
comedies, brings Satan and the impish demon Pug,
together with Iniquity, into the first scene of * The
Devil is an Ass/ Satan opens the play with ' Hoh,
hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hoh ! ' Pug

152 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

begs to be sent up to earth to try his budding devil-
hood on human kind :

O chief 1
You do not know, dear chief ! what there is in me !
Prove me but for a fortnight, for a week,
And lend me but a Vice, to carry with me !

* What Vice ? ' answers Satan.

Why, any : Fraud,

Or Covetousness, or Lady Vanity,

Or old Iniquity.

Iniquity is forthwith summoned, and comes leaping
on the stage in his Harlequin's costume :

What is he calls upon me, and would seem to lack a Vice ?
Ere his words be half spoken, I am with him in a trice ;
Here, there, and everywhere, as the cat is with the mice :
True Vehis Iniquitas, Lack^st thou cards, friend, or dice ?
I will teach thee to cheat, child, to cog, lie, and swagger.
And ever and anon to be drawing forth thy dagger.

And so forth, rattling along in a measure suited to his
antic dance. Satan, however, tells Pug that the Vice is
half a century too old :

Art thou the spirit thou seem*st ? So poor, to choose
This for a Vice, to advance the cause of Hell,
Now, as vice stands this present year ? Remember
What number it is, six hundred and sixteen.
Had it but been five hundred, though some sixty
Above ; that 's fifty years agone, and six,
When every great man had his Vice stand beside him,
In his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger,
I could consent that then this your grave choice
Might have done that, with his lord chief, the which
Most of his chamber can do now.

The Vice, in fact, is out of date, discredited, no

BEN JONSON ON THE VICE. 153

better than a Court fool, fit only to play clowns' pranks
at sheriflFs dinners.

Wc must therefore aim
At extraordinary subtle ones now,
When we do send to keep us up in credit :
Not old Iniquities.

In the induction to * The Staple of News ' two cronies
are introduced as critics of the comedy. After sitting
through the first act, Gossip Mirth says to Gossip
Tattle :

But they have no fool in this play, I am afraid, gossip.

Gossip Tattle remembers the good old times of her
youth, when the Vice and Devil shook the stage to-
gether :

My husband, Timothy Tattle — God rest his poor soul ! — was wont
to say there was no play without a fool and a Devil in 't; he was for
the Devil still, God bless him ! The Devil for his money, would he
say, I would fain see the Devil.

Gossip Mirth caps these reminiscences with her own
recollection of a certain Devil :

As fine a gentleman of his inches as ever I saw trusted to the
stage, or anywhere else ; and loved the Commonwealth as well as
ever a patriot of them all : he would carry away the Vice on his back,
quick to hell, in every play where he came, and reform abuses.

These passages prove sufficiently that the salt of
the Moralities existed for the common folk in the
diabolic characters, and that these characters were
confounded with the parts of clown and fool, sinking
gradually into insignificance with the advance of the
Drama as a work of pure art

154 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

IV.

' Lusty Juventus/ one of the best and most popular
of the Moralities, is styled, ' An enterlude, lively
describing the frailty of youth :• of nature prone to
vice : by grace and good counsel trainable to virtue.'
Such, in truth, is the argument of all these plays. In
the delineation of man's vicious companions, the author
had some scope for the exhibition of coarse scenes of
humour and characters drawn from common life. Of
this opportunity he availed himself liberally. The
virtuous company of abstract qualities, who save the
hero at the close, are employed to deliver dry homilies
upon duty, the means of salvation, and the fundamental
doctrines of religion. Inasmuch as the Moralities were
composed during the uncertain reigns of the first three
Tudors, they reflect the conflict of opinion between Pro-
testantism and the elder faith. Some favour the Re-
formation, and abound in bitter satire on the Roman
priesthood ; others, hardly less satirical, uphold Catholic
tradition. The dramatic talent of the playwright is
shown in the greater or less ability with which he
transforms his allegorical beings into life-like person-
ages ; and, as may readily be conceived, he succeeds
best with the bad folk. Hypocrisy plays a fair monk's
part ; Sensuality and Abominable Living are women
of the town; Freewill is a turbulent ruffler ; Imagina-
tion a giddy-pated pleasure-seeker.

One of our earliest printed Moral Plays, ' Mundus
et Infans,' or * The World and the Child,' issued from
the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1522. Mundus,

PLOTS OF MORAL PLAYS. 155

not unlike God in the Miracles, prologises on his own
great power and majesty. A child comes to him naked
and newly born, asking for clothes and for a name.
Mundus calls him Wanton, and bids him return when
fourteen years are over. The child spends his boyhood
in pastime ; and having come again to Mundus, gets the
name of Lust and Liking. Love and pleasure fill his
thoughts now, and he declares himself to be * as fresh as
flowers in May.' On reaching the age of twenty-one
he is styled Manhood, dubbed knight, and consigned
to the fellowship of the Seven Deadly Sins. But at
this period of his career. Conscience, attired apparently
like a monk, accosts him in the street, and begs to be
informed of his condition :

Conscience,
Why, good sir knight, what is your name ?

Manhood,

Manhood, mighty in mirth and game :
All power of pride have I ta'en :
I am as gentle as jay on tree.

Conscience,

Sir, though the world have you to manhood brought,
I'o maintain manner ye were never taught.
No, conscience clear ye know right nought.
And this longeth to a knight.

Manhood,
Conscience ! What the devil, man, is he ?

Conscience, •

Sir ! a teacher of the spirituality.

Manhood,
Spirituality ! What the devil may that be?

Conscience,
Sir \ all that be leaders in to light.

IS6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Then follows a long debate, in which Conscience
declares to Manhood that, though the Seven Sins be
great and puissant monarchs, holding their might from
Mundus, yet is it no part of Manhood s duty to consort
with them. Manhood is persuaded, and resolves to
take the good advice of Conscience. But no sooner
has he come to this determination, than Folly, who
plays the part of Vice, enters with unseemly jests, and
seduces Manhood A dialogue reveals the birth and
haunts of Folly :

Manhood,
But hark, fellow, by thy faith where wast thou born ?

Folly,

By my faith, in England have I dwelt yore,

And all mine ancestors me before.

But, sir, in London is my chief dwelling.

Manhood,
In London ! ^Vhere, if a man thee sought ?

Folly,

Sir, in Holborn I was forth brought,
And with the courtiers I am betaught.
To Westminster I used to wend.

Manhood,
Hark, fellow, why dost thou to Westminster draw ?

Folly,

For I am a servant of the law.

Covetous is mine own fellow.

We twain plead for the king ;

And poor men that come from upland.

We will take their matter in hand ;

Be it right or be it wrong,

Their thrift with us shall wend.

It next appears that Folly is acquainted with all the

MUNDVS ET INFANS, 157

taverns and houses of ill fame ; and what is more, with
all the monasteries.

Afanhood,
I pray thee yet tell me more of thine adventures.

Folly.

In faith, even straight to all the friars ;
And with them I dwelt many years,
And they crowned me king.

Afanhood,
I pray thee, fellow, whither wendest thou though ?

Folly.

Sir, all England to and fro :

In to abbeys and in to nunneries also ;

And alway Folly doth fellows find.

Manlwod.
Now hark, fellow, I pray thee tell me thy name.

Folly.
I wis I hight both Folly and Shame.

Manhood takes Folly into his service ; and living
riotously in this bad company, is brought at last to
misery. In his last state he is called Age, and repents
him of his evil living :

Alas ! my lewdness hath me lost.

Where is my body so proud and prest ?

I cough and rout, my body will brest.

Age doth follow me so.

I stare and stagger as I stand,

I groan glysly upon the ground.

Alas ! Death, why lettest thou me live so long?

I wander as a wight in woe

And care.

For I have done ill.

Now wend I will

My self to spill,

I care not whither nor where.

iSi SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Perseverance now appears, like a Det^ ex machind,
and reminds Age of the good counsels he received
from Conscience. Age despairs, and says he has
deserved the name of Shame. But Perseverance
christens him Repentance, and cheers him with the
examples of Mary Magdalen, Saul the persecutor,
and Peter who betrayed his Lord. The play ends
with a well-digested diatribe upon the articles of faith
and means provided in the Sacraments for salvation.

It will be seen that * Mundus et Infans ' is a dry
* Rhapsody of Life's Progress,' which the modern reader
may enliven for himself with marginal illustrations
borrowed from the allegorical mosaics upon the pave-
ment of the Sienese Duomo. In those fresh and
charming studies for the Seven Ages of Man, Infantia
goes forth, a winged and naked Cupid, among flowers
to play ; Pueritia takes his walks abroad, attired in a
short jacket, through a pleasaunce ; Adolescentia wears
the habit of a gallant bent on amorous delights, treading
the same primrose path of pleasure ; Juventus carries a
hawk upon his wrist, but just in front of him the road
seems winding upwards to a hill ; Virilitas wears the
long robes of a jurist, and holds a book in his left
hand ; Senectus is yet hale, but shrunken in his long
straight skirts, and bears a staff to stay his feet;
Decrepitas totters upon crutches over a bare space
of ground toward an open tomb.

L USTY JUVENTUS. 1 59

The ' Castle of Perseverance/ supposed to belong
to the reign of Henry VI., was a moral play of the
same type as * Mundus et Infans/ Indeed, it may be
said, once and for all, that the motives of these shows
were few, and that the same theme passed muster
under several titles. This proves the antiquity of the
species, and gives us the right to believe that the
specimens we now possess in MS. and print were
survivals from still earlier originals. ' Lusty Juventus '
goes a step farther in dramatic interest. The scene
opens with a pretty lyric sung by the chief actor,
Youth, the refrain of which is so freshly and joyously
repeated that we might fancy it the echo of a bird's
voice in spring :

In an arbour green asleep where as I lay.
The birds sang sweet in the midst of the day ;
I dreamed fast of mirth and play ;

In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.

Methought I walked still to and fro.
And from her company I could not go ;
But when I waked, it was not so :

In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.

Therefore my heart is surely pight
Of her alone to have a sight,
Which is my joy and hearths delight :

In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.

Good Counsel surprises Juventus in the midst of a
soliloquy describing the amusements in which the
young gentleman delights. Juventus turns to him
with :

i6o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Well met, father, well met !

Did you hear any minstrels play,

As you came hitherward upon your way ?

An if you did, I pray you wise me thither ;

For I am going to seek them, and, in faith, I know not whither.

Good Counsel and a third interlocutor, Knowledge,
who enters after a short space, find Juventus shamefully
ignorant of the rudiments of religious education. Is he
bound, he asks, as well as the clergy, to know and keep
God s law ? They take him seriously to task, quoting
chapter and verse from Ephesians and Galatians to
prove their points, and having primed the youth with
good doctrine, leave him well disposed to walk in the
right path. Juventus has in truth become a model
Puritan, furnished with Protestant principles, and
imbued with a proper hatred for the Papacy. But the
Devil suddenly jumps up. * Ho, ho ! ' quoth he.
' This will not do ! The old folk were loyal in my
service ; but these young people who are growing up,
scorn tradition and rule their lives as "Scripture
teacheth them." ' So he calls Hypocrisy, his dear son,
who has been busy manufacturing relics, beads, copes,
creeds, crowns, and pardons for the Pope. Hypocrisy
undertakes to mould Juventus after the Devil's own
wish. Accordingly he gets him introduced to Abomin-
able Living, a loose serving woman, who plays the
wanton while her masters are at morning sermon.
Juventus takes kindly to her company, swears like a
trooper, and proves his manhood on her lips. A song
appropriate to this situation is introduced :

Why should not youth fulfil his own mind.
As the course of nature doth him bind ?
Is not everything ordained to do his kind ?
Report me to you, report me to you.

YOUTH AND ABOMINABLE LIVING. 161

Do not the flowers spring fresh and gay,
Pleasant and sweet in the month of May ?
But when their time cometh, they fade away.
Report me to you, report me to you

Be not the trees in winter bare ?
IJke unto their kind, such they are ;
And when they spring, their fruits declare.
Report me to you, report me to you.

What should youth do with the fruits of age,
But live in pleasure in his passage ?
For when age cometh, his lusts will swage.
Report me to you, report me to you.

Why should not youth fulfil his own mind.
As the course of nature doth him bind ?
Is not everything ordained to do his kind ?
Report me to you, report me to you.

Juventus now goes off the stage, to pass his time in
mirth and solace with Abominable Living ; for whom,
it may be parenthetically said, he is far too charming
a companion. From dicing, drinking, and wenching,
his former tutors rescue him with some pains, renew
their instructions in Divinity, and bring him to remorse.
Gods Merciful Promises appears in the form of a
preacher, and bids him take heart. Juventus repents,
reconciles himself to God, and ends the play with a
homily upon the duty of avoiding Satan and the Pope,
and clinging steadfastly to Christ's Gospel. The
whole piece, with the exception of its pretty lyrics, the
satiric part of Hypocrisy, and the realistic scenes with
Abominable Living, may well be styled, in the words of
Hawkins and the learned Dr. Percy, *a supplement to
the pulpit' Before leaving it, however, I will extract
a part of the speech in which Hypocrisy describes to
his father, the Devil, the shams which he has foisted

1^4 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

on the world in the name of religfion. His list runs
off like Leporello's in '.Don Giovanni,' and must have
been effective in the mouth of a good buffo-singer :

I set up great idolatry

With all kind of filthy sodometry,

To give mankind a fall ;
And I brought up such superstition,
Under the name of holiness and religion.

That deceived almost all :
As holy cardinals, holy popes.
Holy vestments, holy copes.

Holy hermits and friars ;
Holy priests, holy bishops.
Holy monks, holy abbots.

Yea, and all obstinate liars :
Holy pardons, holy beads.
Holy saints, holy images,

With holy, holy blood ;
Holy stocks, holy stones,
Holy clouts, holy bones.

Yea, and holy holy wood :
Holy skins, holy bulls.
Holy rochets and cowls,

Holy crouches and staves ;
Holy hoods, holy caps.
Holy mitres, holy hats.

Ah, good holy, holy knaves :
Holy days, holy fastings.
Holy twitching, holy tastings.

Holy visions and sights ;
Holy wax, holy lead.
Holy water, holy bread.

To drive away sprights :
Holy fire, holy palm.
Holy oil, holy cream.

And holy ashes also ;
Holy brooches, holy rings.
Holy kneeling, holy censings,

And a hundred trim-trams mo ;
Holy crosses, holy bells,
Holy relics, holy jewels,

Of mine own invention ;

Hypocrisy, 163

Holy candles, holy tapers,
Holy parchments, holy papers-
Had you not a holy son ?

More delicate in literary quality, and perhaps elder
in date of composition, than ' Lusty Juventus,' is the
Interlude of * Youth,' a Moral Play upon the same theme.
Charity takes the part of good genius, contending for
the soul of Youth with Riot the Vice, Lady Lechery
the Courtesan, and Pride, their boon companion. To
dwell upon the texture of the plot, and to show how
Humility helps Charity to rescue Youth from Riot, is
not needful, for this Interlude has little pretension to
dramatic development. Its charm consists in a certain
limpid purity of language and clear presentation of
simple pictures. Youth's own description of himself,
when he makes his first entrance, is very pretty :

Aback, fellows, and give me room ;

Or I shall make you to avoid soon !

I am goodly of person ;

I am peerless wherever I come.

My name is Youth, I tell thee,

I flourish as the vine tree :

WTio may be likened unto me.

In my youth and jollity ?

My hair is royal and bushed thick ;

My body pliant as a hazel-stick ;

Mine arms be both big and strong.

My fingers be both fair and long ;

My chest big as a tun ;

My legs be full light for to run.

To hop and dance and make merry.

By the mass, I reck not a cherry

Whatsoever I do !

I am the heir of all my father's land,

And it is come into my hand :

I care for no mo.

M 2

i64 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Charity admonishes Youth for his self-complacency.

You had need to ask God mercy :
VVhy did you so praise your body ?

Youth.

Why, knave, what is that to thee?
Wilt thou let me to praise my body ?
Why should I not praise it, an it be goodly ?
I will not let for thee.

Charity warns Youth that his beautiful body will
wither and go down into the grave, and he himself be
burned in hell. Were it not better to make sure of
heaven :

Where thou shalt see a glorious sight
Of angels singing, and saints bright.
Before the fate of God ?

But all is to little purpose, for Youth tells Charity
with blunt irreverence that God is not likely to take
such dreary guests as he into His company :

Nay, nay, I warrant thee,
He hath no place for thee ;
Weenest thou He will have such fools
To sit on His gay stools ?
Nay, I warrant thee, nay !

Riot is much more to Youth's mind than Charity ;
and Riot puts the old proverb about wild oats so
pithily before him as to make short work with Charity's
arguments.

Hark, Youth, for God avow.
He would have thee a saint now ;
But, Youth, I shall you tell—
A young saint, an old devil :
Therefore I hold thee a fool,
An thou follow his school.

'HICK scorner: 165

All the same, in spite of his bluster and recalcitration,
when the time comes for the piece to end, Youth
yields to Charity and suffers himself to be converted
by Humility without a struggle. The authors of
Moralities had not advanced beyond the point of per-
sonification and dramatic collocation. To take the
further step, and to display the reciprocal interaction
of persons, was beyond them.

VI.

In * Hick Scorner,' a real personage, though divided
by the thinnest partition wall from allegory, enlivens
the usual exhibition of abstract qualities. The piece
opens with a dialogue between Pity, Contemplation,
and Perseverance, attired like Doctors of Divinity.
They discourse at length upon the low state of public
morality. Pity is then left alone, to bear the brunt of
the two comic characters, Freewill and Imagination,
who come upon the stage swaggering like blackguards.
The conversation of these good fellows brings the
humours of the town before us in language which,
if racy, hardly bears transcription. Hick Scorner, a
traveller from foreign parts, breaks in upon their col-
loquy, and is welcomed as a boon companion by the
jolly pair. Hick has been everywhere and seen every-
thing. The ship which brought him back to England,
bore the vices, weathering a storm in which the virtues
with their godly crew foundered. He scoffs at all
things human and divine, and, after quarrelling awhile
with Freewill and Imagination, makes the matter up,
and puts Pity in the stocks. Then he disappears.

i66 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

This is all we hear of the person who gives his name
to the play. Pity's two friends return, liberate him
from the stocks, and help him to convert Freewill and
Imagination ; a job which the trio carry through with
truly undramatic celerity. The construction of this
play is radically bad. It falls flat between an allegory
and a farce ; nor does it display that analysis of life
which lends a scientific interest to some of the weightier
Moralities. Yet, in the development of the English
drama, it takes a place of mark ; for all the characters
are well touched, with pungency of portraiture and
verisimilitude. Hick himself, though so occasional a
personage, shows the author's effort after artistic
emancipation.

A set of woodcuts, appended to this play in Wynkyn
de Worde's edition, exemplify the figures which the
actors cut upon the stage. Pity is a mild old man ; as fits
the character of God's eternal Mercy. Contemplation
carries a sword, to use in shrewd passes with the Evil
One. Hick walks delicately, waving his hands to and
fro, like one who jests upon the surface of the world.
Freewill bears a staff, and is a gallant of the town.
Imagination distinguishes himself from his friend and
master less by costume than by an airy motion of his
legs, betokening inconstancy and lightness. Perse-
verance is armed at all points in plate mail, rests his
right hand on a trenchant blade, and carries in his left
a banner, striding forth alert for action. Gazing
at these woodcuts, we understand what allegory was
for the English people, and how after two centuries
the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' came into existence.

' New Custom' claims some passing notice in con-

REFORM A TION PLA YS, 167

nection with ' Lusty Juventus ' and * Hick Scomer.' To
judge by its style, it is considerably later in date, and
may be ascribed perhaps to the first decade of Eliza-
beth's reign. In substance it is neither more nor less
than a tract in favour of the Reformation, furnished with
dramatic forms, but composed in so wooden a manner
that one can hardly conceive it to have been often
acted. The names of the persons are, however, in-
teresting. Perverse Doctrine and Ignorance are two
old Popish priests ; New Custom and Light of the
Gospel, two ministers of the reformed faith. Cruelty
and Avarice, who gloat with delight over their me-
mories of the Marian persecution, are described as
rufflers, that is bullies. Hypocrisy is an old woman.
There is no Vice. One sentence put into the mouth of
Perverse Doctrine deserves quotation :

For since these Genevan doctors came so fast into this land,
Since that time it was never merry with England.

*The Trial of Treasure' is another Moral Play
which bears the impress of the Reformation, and may
be attributed to the same period as * New Custom.'
Its aim, however, is ethical and not religious edification:
and the chief point to notice, is the quaint mixtum
of moral saws from classic sources jumbled up with
sentences from the Episdes. The Vice takes a pro-
minent part, under the name of Inclination ; but in
spite of his crude horse-play with Lust, Greedy-gut,
and Elation, there is little to move laughter in the
piece. Ulpian Ful well's 'Like will to Like' maybe
placed in the same class as the ' Trial of Treasure.'
The Vice is called Nichol Newfangle; his companions

1 68 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

are Tom Tosspot, Cuthbert Cutpurse, Ralph Roister,
Pierce Pickpurse, Hance a serving man, Hankin
Hangman, Philip Fleming, Tom Collier — names which
sufficiently indicate the author s endeavour to substitute
comedy for allegory. Indeed, the allegorical setting of
this piece is merely conventional, and the moralising
made to order.

VII.

Far more perfect in design, and very full of interest
to modern readers, is the ancient piece called ' Every-
man.' That it was not so popular as * Lusty Juventus '
or * Hick Scorner * can be readily conceived, because
its lesson is grim and dreadful. We may bring our-
selves into relation with the motive of this play by
studying the woodcuts in Queen Elizabeths Prayer
Book or any one of the Dances of Death ascribed to
Holbein. The frontispiece to * Everyman ' recalls one
of those remorseless meditations on the grave. A fine
gentleman of the Court of Henry VII. is walking with
his hat upon his head and a chain around his neck
among the flowers of a meadow. Death, the skeleton,
half-clothed in a loose shroud, and holding in his arm
the cover of a sepulchre, beckons to this gallant from
a churchyard full of bones and crosses. Life is thus
brought into abrupt collision with the ' cold Hie Janets
of the dead ' and him who rules there. Collier, who
thinks this play may be as old as the reign of Edward
IV., terms it ' one of the most perfect allegories ever
formed ; ' nor is this praise extravagant, for the texture
of the plot is both simple and strong, in strict keeping
with its stern and serious theme. God opens the play

EVERYMAN? 169

with a monologue in which He sets forth the sacrifice
of Christ, and upbraids mankind for their ingratitude.
Worldly riches cumber them ; they pay no heed to
piety ; justice must be done upon them, and each soul
shall be reminded of his latter end. Therefore he calls
Death to Him : ^

Where art thou, Death, thou mighty messenger ?
Death answers :

Almighty God, I am here at your will

He is then sent forth to go in search of Everyman,
and tell him to prepare for a long pilgrimage. Death
finds this representative of the whole human race
disporting himself in careless wise, and suddenly
arrests him :

Everyman, stand still 1 Whither art thou going
Thus gaily ?

When Everyman hears the message, he begs a
respite, and offers Death gold ; but all the favour he
can find is the permission to take with him such
friends as shall be willing to bear him company.
Fellowship proffers his readiness to do anything for
Everyman ; but when he hears of Death and that long
pilgrimage, he shakes his head. If you had asked me
to drink or dice or kill a man with you, I would have
done it — but this, no ! Kindred passes by, hears Every-
man's request, and says the same as Fellowship, but
with even less sympathy. Then Everyman betakes
him to his Goods ; but these are so close packed away

* In the Coventry Miracles, Mors says : * I am Death, God*s
messenger,'

I70 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in bags and boxes that they cannot stir. Far from
being disposed to help him, Gold only mocks at his
distress, rejoices in it, and chuckles at the thought of
staying in the world to corrupt more souls of men.
At length Everyman remembers his Good Deeds.
* My Good Deeds, where be you ? * She (for Good
Deeds is a female character) replies :

Here I lie, cold in the ground ;
Thy sins have me so sore bound
That I cannot stir.

She, however, is the only one of Everyman's ac-
quaintances who yields him any service. She bids
him have recourse to Knowledge, and Knowledge
introduces him to Confessioa Confession shrives
him, and releases Good Deeds from her dungeon.
Then Everyman makes ready for his journey, taking
with him Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and Five Wits.
When they reach the churchyard, Everyman begins
to faint ; and each of these false friends forsakes him.
Good Deeds alone has no horror of the grave, but
descends with him to abide God's judgment. The
piece ends with an Angel's song, welcoming the soul of
Everyman, which has been parted from the body and
made fit for heaven.

The Moral Play of ' Everyman ' has an interesting
parallel in William BuUein's * Dialogue both pleasant
and pitiful, wherein is a goodly Regiment against the
Fever Pestilence.' This tract, printed in 1564, and
again in 1573, illustrates the influence which the
Drama at that early period exercised over style. It
is conceived in the manner of the Moralities, and its
descriptive passages enable us to understand how they

BULLEIlSnS 'DIALOGUES 171

affected the imaginations of their audience. The dia-
logue introduces a citizen, with his wife and serving-
man, flying from London during a visitation of the
plague. Death meets them on their journey. The
wife deserts her husband, * for poverty and death will
part good fellowship.' The servant runs away, and
the citizen is left alone to parley with the awful appa-
rition. He tries to bribe Death with money, and to
soften him with prayers. But Death is obdurate ; the
man's hour has come ; he must away from wife and
children; no matter whether he leave his debts un-
paid, his business in confusion. * For,* says Death,
* I have commission to strike you with this black dart
called the pestilence ; my master hath so commanded
me : and as for gold, I take no thought of it, I love
it not ; no treasure can keep me back the twinkling of
an eye from you ; you are my subject, and I am your
lord.' Before executing his commission, the Angel of
the Lord holds discourse with his victim upon the
meaning of the three darts, plague, famine, and war,
he carries in his hand. His speech ends with a
solemn passage, worthy to be quoted side by side
with Ralegh's famous apostrophe to 'eloquent, just,
and mighty Death.' It runs as follows : * I overthrow
the dancer, and stop the breath of the singer, and trip
the runner in his race. I break wedlock, and make
many widows. I do sit in judgment with the judge,
and undo the life of the prisoner, and at length kill the
judge also himself. I do summon the great Bishops,
and cut them through the rochets. I utterly banish
the beauty of all courtiers, and end the miseries of the
poor. I will never leave off until all flesh be utterly

172 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

destroyed. I am the greatest cross and scourge of
God'^

VIII.

A whole group of the Moral Plays are devoted
to subjects capable of more dramatic development,
involving the oudines of a love-plot and a r^^lar
denouement. Of these it may suffice to mention the
Marriage of Wit and Wisdom ' and the * Marriage of
Wit and Science,* the latter of which exists in two
separate forms. Wit is the son of Severity and
Indulgence. The characters of the father and the
mother are sharply contrasted and brought into bold
relief by a few strong touches in the opening scene.
They send Wit forth to court the maiden Wisdom,
giving him Good Nurture for a guardian. But Idle-
ness, the Vice, intrudes ; and assuming many disguises,
leads him astray. He first lures him under the name
of Honest Recreation to Dame Wantonness, by whom
Wit is besotted and befooled. Then he causes him,
in the pursuit of tedious study, to be entrapped by
Irksomeness, who always lurks in wait for Wisdom's
suitors. The lady, however, rescues her knight, and
gives him a sword with which he puts Irksomeness to
flight Wit has not yet learned by experience to walk
straight forward to his end. Fancy, therefore, is able
to decoy him into prison. Here Good Nurture dis-
covers and releases him ; and at last he is wedded

^ I am indebted to Mr. A. H. Bullen for the above extracts from this
rare * Dialogue,' which he communicated to me while the proof-sheets of
this book were passing through the press. It is to be hoped that before
long he will edit a reprint of the whole tract.

MORAL PLAYS WITH A PLOT. I73

to Wisdom, the virgin, who has waited for him all
this while in desert places. The allegory of this play
is clear; its language has some delicacy, and the
comic scenes are entertaining.

The plot of * Wit and Science ' is conducted on the
same lines. Wit goes through similar adventures,
and finally weds Science. It contains a curious comic
scene, in which Idleness teaches the child Ignorance to
spell, purposely making the lesson difficult. This cor-
responds to a passage in the * Marriage of Wit and
Wisdom,' where Idleness mocks Search by pretending
to follow what he says, repeating all his words after
him with ludicrous misinterpretations.

The ' Four Elements ' introduces a different species
of allegory. Nature undertakes to instruct Humanity
in the physical sciences, and gives him Studious Desire
as a companion. Humanity takes kindly to her tedi-
ous homilies until the Vice, named Sensual Appetite,
appears upon the scene. He then plunges into a whirl
of vulgar dissipation with the Vice and Ignorance
and a Taverner, not, however, wholly intermitting his
studies in cosmography and such like matters. There
is, however, no cohesion between the several parts of
the action ; and we may assume, I think, that in the
piece, as we possess it, the mirth-making scenes, which
bring the Vice and his comic crew into play, have
overgrown the allegory to its ultimate confusion. Some
interest attaches still to the * Four Elements,' because the
type of allegory first displayed in it held the stage all
through the golden period of art, in Masques and
learned shows. Long after the publication of Shak-
spere's plays in 1637, Thomas Nabbes brought out a

f74 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSOR^.

' Moral Masque ' styled * Microcosmus/ in which Phy-
sander, or the natural man, is married to Bellanima, and
receives for his attendants the Four Complexions and
a Good and Evil Genius. Lured astray by the Evil
Genius, he forsakes his chaste wife, and takes up his
abode with the Five Senses in the house of Sensuality, a
Courtesan. Bellanima tries in vain to reclaim him,
until at last he is flung forth, weak, jaded, and good for
nothing, from the halls of Sensuality. Then Bellanima
and the Good Genius conduct him in sorry plight
to Temperance, who cures him of his sickness, while
Reason fortifies his soul against the attacks of Remorse
and Despair and the Furies, whom the Evil Genius
has summoned to accuse him at the bar of Conscience.
At the end of the piece, which is a formal play divided
into five acts, Bellanima and Physander ascend to
Elysium.

I have given this rapid sketch of * M icrocosmus '
in order to show how the motives of the Moral Plays
were combined and treated by the later Elizabethan
authors. In the interval between the date of the

* Four Elements ' and ' Mundus et Infans ' and that of

* M icrocosmus,' they assumed a classical complexion,
and a more elaborate form. But they remained at root
the same. It would be easy to illustrate this point
from many subsequent products of our stage — from
the * Misogonus ' of Rychards, of which we have a
MS. dated 1577; from Woodes' 'Conflict of Con-
science,' printed in 1581 ; from the anonymous 'Con-
tention between Liberality and Prodigality,' printed in
1602 ; and from such later works of literary ingenuity
as Randolph's ' Muses' Looking Glass,' and Brewer's

ADVANCE TOWARD COMEDY. i^

excellent * Lingua.' But enough has been already said
to indicate the comparative vitality of the species ; and
it is probable that I shall have to draw particular atten-
tion at a later stage of these studies to some at least of
the works which I have named.

IX.

Already, in the early period of which I am at
present treating, efforts were made to disengage the
Moral Play from its allegorical setting, and to present
the pith of its motives in a form of proper Comedy.
The * Nice Wanton/ for example, introduces us to a
family consisting of Barnabas, Delilah, and Ismael,
and their mother Xantippe. Xantippe spares the rod,
and lets her children grow up as they list Iniquity,
who supports the chief action of the piece, seduces
Delilah to wantonness, and Ismael to roguery. Both
come to miserable deaths. Xantippe is on the point
of dying of shame, when her son Barnabas, after rating
his mother soundly for her weak indulgence, reminds
her of God s mercy, and saves her from despair. The
* Disobedient Child ' presents a son, who scorns his
father s good advice, marries a wanton wife, spends his
substance in divers pleasures with her, and returns
home penniless. Unlike the father in the Parable of the
Prodigal Son, this stem parent contents himself with
reminding the lad that he had told him so beforehand,
and sends him about his business with a small dole.
The Devil utters a long soliloquy in the middle of the
play, but does not influence its action. A third piece,
named * Jack Juggler,' said to be written * for children

176 SMAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

to play/ deserves mention for the curiosity of its being
modelled on the * Amphitryon ' of Plaiitus, which it
follows longissimo sane intervallo ! It is really nothing
more than a merry interlude between a scape-grace
page called Jenkin Careaway, and Jack Juggler, which
latter is our old friend the Vice. The other characters
have slight importance.

Having examined some of the Moralities in detail,
it will be interesting to inquire into the mode of their
performance. During the heyday of their popularity,
it appears that they were acted by roving companies
on holidays and at hock-tide festivals in the halls of
noblemen and gentry, as well as on the open squares of
towns. They acquired the subordinate name of Inter-
lude from the custom of having them exhibited in the
intervals of banquets or the interspace of other pas-
times. A Messenger announced the show in the case
of public representations, and explained the argument
in a prologue. Not unfrequently a Doctor, surviving
from the Expositor of the Miracles, interpreted its
allegory as the action proceeded.

It may also be remarked that noblemen, whose
households were maintained upon a princely scale,
kept their own companies of actors. We hear of the
'Players of the Kings Interludes' so early as the
reign of Henry VII. ; and the books of the Percy
family contain curious information respecting payments
made to the Lord Northumberland's Servants. The
Lords Ferrers, Clinton, Oxford, and Buckingham, are

HOW MORAL PLAYS WERE ACTED. 177

known to have kept private actors at the beginning
of the sixteenth century. In those great baronial
establishments, musicians, minstrels, and chapel cho-
risters had long formed a separate department ; and
when the acting of Interludes became fashionable, the
players were attached to this section of the household.
Cities also began to entertain companies for the occa-
sional representation of Pageants, Masques, and Plays.
Thus a dramatic profession was gradually formed,
which only waited for a favourable opportunity to
render itself independent of patronage, and to develop
a national theatre by competition and free appeal to
public favour.

For the further illustration of these details, we are
fortunate in having ready to our hand a lively episode
in the History Play of ' Sir Thomas More/ It may be
premised that the strolling companies consisted of four
or at the outside five persons. The leading actor
played the part of Vice and undertook stage manage-
ment. There was a boy for the female characters ; and
the remaining two or three divided the other parts
between them. Sir Thomas More, in the play in ques-
tion, has invited the Lord Mayor and Aldermen with
their respective ladies to a banquet. The feast is
spread ; but no further entertainment has been furnished,
and the guests are presently expected. At this moment
a Player is announced. More greets him with :

Welcome, good friend ; what is your will with me ?

Player,

My lord, my fellows and myself

Are come to tender you our willing service,

So please you to command us. v

178 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

More.

What ! for a play, you mean ?
Whom do ye serve ?

Flayer.
My Lord Cardinars grace.

Afore.

My Lord CardinaPs players ! Now, trust me, welcome !

You happen hither in a lucky time.

To pleasure me, and benefit yourselves.

The Mayor of London and some Aldermen,

His lady and their wives, are my kind guests

This night at supper. Now, to have a play

Before the banquet will be excellent

I prithee, tell me, what plays have ye ?

Flayer.

Divers, my lord : * The Cradle of Security,'

' Hit the Nail o' th' Head,' * Impatient Poverty,'

* The Play of Four P's,' * Dives and Lazarus,'

* Lusty Juventus,* and * The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom.'

So the Player runs through his repertory. The name
of the last hits More s mood, and he rejoins :

* The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom ! ' That, my lads,
I '11 none but that ! The theme is very good.

And may maintain a liberal argument.
We 11 see how Master-poet plays his part,
And whether Wit or Wisdom grace his art.
Go, make him drink, and all his fellows too.
How many are ye ?

Player.
Four men and a boy.

More.

But one boy ? Then 1 see,

There 's but few women in the play.

Player.

Three, my lord ; Dame Science, Lady Vanity,
And VV isdom — she herself

AfORE AND THE PLAYERS. 179

More.

And one boy play them all ? By *r Lady, he *s loaden !
Well, my good fellows, get ye strait together,
And make ye ready with what haste ye may.
Provide their supper Against the play be done,
Else we shall stay our guests here overlong.
Make haste, I pray ye.

Player,
We will, my lord

The Chancellor now tells his wife that the Lord
Cardinal's Players have luckily turned up. She ap-
proves of their engagement. They both receive their
guests, and seat them for the Interlude. At this point
the chief player, dressed as the Vice, appears, and begs
for a few minutes respite. More addresses him :

More, How now ! What *s the matter ?

Vice, We would desire your honour but to stay a little. One of
my fellows is but run to Oagles for a long beard for young Wit, and
he '11 be here presently.

More. A long beard for young Wit ! Why, man, he may be
without a beard till he comes to marriage, for wit goes not all by the
hair. When comes Wit in ?

Vice, In the second scene, next to the Prologue, my lord.

More, Why, play on till that scene comes, and by that time Wit's
beard will be grown, or else the fellow returned with it And what
part playest thou ?

Vice, Inclination, the Vice, my lord.

More, Graramercy ! Now I may take the Vice if I list; and
wherefore hast thou that bridle in thy hand?

Vice, I must be bridled anon, my lord.

They exchange a few words about the purpose of the
play ; and then the scene opens. It is the first act of
' Lusty Juventus,' adapted with retrenchments. Incli-
nation and Lady Vanity are in the course of seducing
Wit, when the Vice suddenly pulls up with :

Is Luggins yet come with the beard ?

N 2

I go SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Enter another Player,
No, faith, he is not come : alas ! what shall we do ?

The Vice, who is the driver of the team, expresses the
dislocation of the whole company by this unforeseen
accident :

Forsooth, we can go no further till our fellow Luggins come ; for
he plays Good Counsel, and now he should enter, to admonish Wit
that this is Lady Vanity and not Lady Wisdom.

More throws himself into the breach, and from his
place before the stage undertakes to play the part of
Good Counsel, which he does excellently well in default
of Luggins. When Luggins at length appears with
the beard, the Vice turns to his lordship :

Oh, my lord, he is come. Now we shall go forward.

But the Chancellor thinks it is about time to conduct
his guests to the banquet chamber. So the scene
breaks up, and the players are left to altercate about
this hitch in their arrangements. They pay due com-
pliments to Mores ready wit :

Do ye hear, fellows ? Would not my lord make a rare player ?
Oh, he would uphold a company beyond all. Ho ! better than
Mason among the King's Players ! Did ye mark how extemprically
he fell to the matter, and spake Luggins's part almost as it is in the
very book set down ?

While they are so discoursing, a serving man
enters with the news that More is called to Court, and
that he bids the players take eight angels, and, after
they have supped, retire. The fellow doles the money
out short of twenty shillings, taking his discount, as
the way of flunkeys was, and is. Wit begins to
grumble :

TRANSITIONAL SP^ECIES OF PLAYS. i8i

This, Luggins, is your negligence ;
Wanting Wit's beard brought things into dislike ;
For otherwise the play had been all seen,
Where now some curious citizen disgraced it,
And discommending it, all is dismissed.

They count their money, and find wherein it fails.
But Wit mends the whole matter ; for when the Chan-
cellor sweeps by to Court, he bids his lordship notice
that two of the eight angels have been somehow
dropped in the rushes. More calls his servant to
account, rights the players, and goes forth on affairs
of State.

This scene, which in some of its incidents reminds
us roughly of Hamlet's interview with the Players, was
no doubt intended to mark the character of More, and
bring his humour and good nature into relief. But it
serves our present purpose of vividly presenting the
circumstances under which a strolling company of
actors may have oftentimes in noble houses found
the opportunity to play some more or less mangled
version of a popular Morality.

XI.

Before taking final leave of the Moral Plays, it will
be necessary to notice three pieces which may be
described as hybrids between this species and the
serious drama of the future. The first of these
is * King Johan,' by John Bale the controversialist.
Written certainly before Mary's accession to the
throne of England, this play is the earliest extant
specimen of the History, which was reserved for

i82 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

such high treatment at the hands of Marlowe and
Shakspere. King John plays the chief part, and
the legend of his death by poison is followed.
But the interesting feature of the performance is
that personifications, including the Nobility, the
Clergy, Civil Order, the Commonalty, Verity and
Imperial Majesty, are introduced in dialogue with real
historical beings. The Vice too, under the name of
Sedition, plays his usual pranks, while Dissimulation
hatches the plot of the kings murder. * King Johan '
must be read less as a history-drama than as a pam-
phlet against Papal encroachment and ecclesiastical
corruption. But it has some vigorous and some
tolerably amusing scenes, and contains the following
very curious old wassail song :

Wassail, wassail, out of the milk pail ;
Wassail, wassail, as white as my nail ;
Wassail, wassail, in snow, frost, and hail ;
Wassail, wassail, with partridge and rail ;
Wassail, wassail, that much doth avail ;
Wassail, wassail, that never will fail

Besides this piece, John Bale wrote a Moral Play in
seven parts, with the title of * God's Merciful Promises,'
and two sacred plays on ' The Temptation of our
Lord* and ' John Baptist,' both of which are survivals
from the elder Miracles. These are in print. Others
of the same description by his hand remain in MS.

The anonymous tragedy of ' Appius and Virginia '
is a dramatised version of the Roman legend which
had previously been handled by Chaucer in his * Doctor
of Physic s Tale.' A leading part is assigned to the
Vice, Haphazard ; and allegorical personages. Con-

'KING JOHAN' AND OTHERS, 183

science, Rumour, Comfort, Reward, Memory, and
Doctrine, are intermingled with the mortal personages.
The same hybrid character distinguishes Preston's
' Cambyses/ Here, the Vice is styled Ambidexter ;
and a crowd of abstractions jostle with clowns and
courtiers — Huff and Ruff, Hob and Lob, Smirdis and
Sisamnes, Praxaspes and the Queen. Neither of these
clumsy attempts at tragedy invites a close analysis.
It is enough to have mentioned them as intermediate
growths between the Moral Play and the emancipated
drama.

1 84 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

CHAPTER V.

THE RISE OF COMEDY.

I. Specific Nature of the Interlude— John Heywood— The Farce of
* Johan the Husband '— *The Pardoner and the Friar.'— II. Heywood's
Life and Character.— III. Analysis of *The Four Ps '—Chaucerian
Qualities of Heywood's Talent.— IV. Nicholas Udall and * Ralph
Roister Doister'— Its Debt to Latin Comedy.— V. John Still— Was He
the Author of * Gammer Gurton's Needle' i* — Farcical Character of this
Piece— Diccon the Bedlam.— VI. Reasons for the Early Development
of Comedy.

N.B. The three pieces reviewed in this chapter will be found in
Hazlitt's Dodsley^ vols. i. and iii.

The passage from Moral Plays to Comedy had been
virtually effected in such pieces as * Calisto and
Meliboea ' and ' The Disobedient Child/ both of which
are wrought without the aid of allegories. In dealing
with the origins of the Drama, it would, however, be
impossible to omit one specifically English form of
comedy, which appeared contemporaneously with the
later Moralities, and to which the name of Interlude
has been attached. The Interlude, in this restricted
sense of the term, was the creation of John Heywood,
a genial writer in whom the spirit of Chaucer seems to
have lived again. In some of his productions, as
' The Play of the Weather ' and * The Play of Love,'
he adhered to the type of the Morality. Others are
simple dialogues, corresponding in form to the Latin

THE INTERLUDE, 185

Disputationes, of which mention has been made above.
But three considerable pieces, * The Merry Play
between Johan the Husband, Tyb his Wife, and Sir
John the Priest,' * The Four P's,' and * The Merry
Play between the Pardoner and the Friar, the Curate
and Neighbour Pratt,* detach themselves from any
previous species, and constitute a class apart. The
first is a simple farce, in which a henpecked husband
sits by fasting, while his wife and the jovial parish
priest make a good meal on the pie which was
provided for the dinner of the family. It contains
abundance of broad humour, and plenty of coarse
satire on the equivocal position occupied by the parson
in Johan s household. The third has no plot of any
kind. Its point consists in the rivalry between a
Pardoner and a Friar, who try to preach each other
down in church, vaunting their own spiritual wares
with voluble and noisy rhetoric. The speeches are
so managed that when the Pardoner has begun a
sentence, it is immediately intercepted by the Friar,
with a perpetual crescendo of mutual interruptions and
confusing misconstructions, till the competition ends
in a downright bout at fisticuffs. Then the Curate
interferes, protesting that his church shall not be made
the theatre of such a scandal. He calls Pratt to his
assistance; and each of them tackles one of the
antagonists. But Pratt and the Curate find themselves
too hardly matched ; and at length they send both
Pardoner and Friar to the devil with the honours of
the fray pretty equally divided. It may be incident-
ally mentioned that He5rvvood has incorporated some
fifty lines of Chaucer s * Pardoner s Prologue ' almost

1 86 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

verbatim in the exordium of his Pardoner — z, proof, if
any proof were needed, of the close link between his
art and that of the father of English poetry.

II.

John Heywood was a Londoner, and a choir boy
of the Chapel Royal. ^ When his voice broke, he
proceeded in due course to Oxford, and studied at
Broadgate Hall, now Pembroke College. Sir John
More befriended him, and took a kindly interest, we
hear, in the composition of his first work, a collec-
tion of epigrams. Early in his life Heywood obtained
a fixed place at Court in connection with the exhibition
of Interludes and Plays. It is probably due to this
fact that he has been reckoned among the King's
jesters; and if he was not actually a Yorick of the
Tudor Court, there is no doubt that he played a merry
part there, and acquired considerable wealth by the
exercise of his wit After Henry's death he fell
under suspicion of disaffection to the Government, and
only escaped, says Sir John Harrington, ' the jerk of
the six-stringed whip * by special exercise of Edward's
favour. Heywood was a staunch Catholic, and his
offence seems to have been a too sturdy denial of
the royal supremacy in spiritual affairs. When Mary
came to the throne, he was recalled to Court, where he

* I take this on the faith of Mr. Julian Sharman's Introduction to his
edition of The Pr<nierb5 of John Heywood (London : George Bell, 1874).
Heywood is there stated to have held a place among the Children of the
Chapel in 1 51 5. It is not altogether easy, however, to bring this detail
into harmony with the little that we know about his early life, especially
with the circumstance that he owned land at North Mims.

LIFE OF JOHN HEYWOOD, 187

exercised his dramatic talents for the Queen's amuse-
ment, and lived on terms of freedom with her nobility.
After Mary's death, being a professed enemy of the
Reformed Church, Heywood left England, and died
about the year 1565 at Mechlin. One of his sona^
Jasper Heywood, played a part of some importance in
the history of our drama, as we shall see when the
attempted classical revival comes to be discussed.

The vicissitudes of Hey wood's life are not with-
out their interest in connection with his Interludes.
During the religious changes of four reigns, he con-
tinued faithful to the creed of his youth. Yet, though
he suffered disgrace and exile for the Catholic faith, he
showed himself a merciless satirist of Catholic corrup-
tions. Though he was a professional jester, gaining
his livelihood and taking his position in society as a
recognised mirth-maker, he allowed no considerations
of personal profit to cloud his conscience. He re-
mained an Englishman to the backbone, loyal to his
party and his religious convictions, outspoken in his
condemnation of the superstitions which disgraced the
Church of his adoption. This manliness of attitude,
this freedom from time-service, this fearless exposure
of the weak points in a creed to which he sacrificed
his worldly interests, give a dignity to Heywood's
character, and prepossess us strongly in favour of his
writings. Their tone, like that of the man, is homely,
masculine, downright, and English, in the shrewdness
of the wit, the soundness of the sense, and the jovial
mirth which pervades each scene.

i88 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

III.

The ' Four P s/ which I propose to examine more
closely, is an excellent comic dialogue. More than this
it cannot claim to be ; for it has no intrigue, and aims at
the exhibition of characters by contrast and collocation,
not by action. Its motive is a witty situation, and its
denouement is a single humorous saying. Thus this
Interlude has not the proportions of a play, although
its dialogue exhibits far more life, variety, and spirit
than many later and more elaborate creations of the
English stage. It is written in pure vernacular, terse
and racy if rude, and undefiled by classical pedantry
or Italianising affectation. Heywood, here as elsewhere,
reminds us of Chaucer without his singing robes. As
Charles Lamb called his namesake Thomas Heywood
a prose Shakspere, so might we style John Heywood
a prose Chaucer. The humour which enchants us in the
* Canterbury Tales,' and which we claim as specifically
English, emerges in Heywood s dialogue, less concen-
trated and blent with neither pathos nor poetic fancy,
yet still indubitably of the genuine sort.

The Four P s are four representative personages, well
known to the audience of Heywood s day. They are
the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the Pedlar.
The Palmer might be described as a professional pilgrim.
He made it his business to travel on foot all through
his life from shrine to shrine, subsisting upon alms,
visiting all lands in Europe and beyond the seas where
saints were buried, praying at their tombs, seeking
remission for his sins through their intercessions and

THE 'FOUR P*SJ 189

entrance into Paradise by the indulgence granted to
pilgrims at these holy places.^ His wanderings only
ended with his death. Pardoners are described in an
old English author as * certain fellows that carried about
the Pope s Indulgences, and sold them to such as would
buy them.' ^ Since this was a very profitable trade, it
behoved the purchasers of their wares, which, besides
Indulgences, were generally relics of saints, rosaries,
and amulets, to see that their credentials were in order ;
for, even supposing, if that were possible, that a Pardoner
could be an honest man, and his genuine merchandise
be worth the money paid for it, who could be sure that
impostors, deriving no countenance from the Roman
Curia, were not abroad ? Therefore all Pardoners dis-
played Bulls and spiritual passports from the Popes,
which, if duly executed and authenticated, empowered
them to sell salvation at so much the groat. The diffi-
culty of testing these credentials put wary folk in much
perplexity. Ariosto has used this motive in a humorous
scene of one of his best comedies, where a would-be
purchaser of pardon insists on taking the friar s Bull to
his parish priest for verification.^ Chaucer alludes to
the custom of Pardoners exhibiting their Bulls, in the
exordium of his * Pardoners Tale,' and Heywood in the

* Dante defines a Palmer thus in the K//^ Nuova : * Chiamansi
Palmicri inquanto vanno oltra mare, laonde molte volte recano la
palma : Peregriniy inquanto vanno alia casa di Galizia ; Romei inquanto
vanno a Roma.' In England a distinction was drawn between Palmers
and Pilgrims. * The pilgrim had some home or dwelling-place ; but the
palmer had none. The pilgrim travelled to some certain designed place
or places ; but' the palmer to all. The pilgrim went at his own charges ;
but the palmer professed wilful poverty, and went upon alms,' &c. See
Note 2 to p. 331 of Hazlitt's Dodsley^ vol. i.

^ Hazlitt's Dodsley^ i. 343, Note 2.

^ Scolasiica^ Act iv. Scene 4.

190 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Interlude of * The Pardoner and tlje Friar makes merry
for many pages with the same motive.^ The sale of
Indulgences, as is well known, brought large profits to
the Papal exchequer ; and when the extravagance of
Leo X. plunged him into deep financial difficulties, his
eagerness to stimulate this source of revenue drove
Germany into the schism of the Reformation. While
S. Peter's was being built with commissions upon par-
dons, Luther was taunting the laity with ' buying such
cheap rubbish at so dear a price/

Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner forms so good a
frontispiece to Heywood's Interlude, that a quotation
from it may be here acceptable :

This pardoner hadde heer as yelwe as wex,
But smothe it heng, as doth a strike of flex ;
By unces hynge his lokkes that he hadde,
And therewith he his schuldres overspradde.
Ful thinne it lay, by culpons on and oon ;

But hood, for jolitee, ne werede he noon.

« * * •

A voys he hadde as smal as eny goot.

No herd ne hadde he, ne nevere scholde have,

As smothe it was as it were late i-schave.

♦ ♦ ♦ «

But trewely to tellen atte laste,
He was in churche a noble ecclesiaste.
Wei cowde he rede a lessoun or a storye.
But altherbest he sang an offertorie.

The Poticary, or Apothecary, and the Pedlar re-
quire no special introduction to a modem audience.
Both are much the same in our days as in those of
Queen Mary — the Pedlar with his pack stuffed full of
gauds and gear for women ; the Poticary taking life
as a philosopher inclined to materialism.

* See Hazlitt's Dodsley^ vol. i. pp. 212-223.

THE PARDONER, 191

The scene opens with a monologue of the Palmer.
He recites a long list of the shrines which he has
visited :

I am a Palmer, as ye see,

Which of my life much part have spent

In many a fair and far country :

As Pilgrims do, of good intent.

At Jerusalem have I been

Before Christ's blessed sepulchre :

The Mount of Calvary have I seen,

A holy place, you may be sure.

To Jehosaphat and Olivet

On foot, God wot, I went right bare :

Many a salt tear did I sweat,

Before my carcase could come there

Yet have I been at Rome also.

And gone the stations all a- row ;

S. Peter's shrine and many mo.

Than, if I told all, ye do know.

Beginning with the holiest places, Jerusalem and
Rome, he runs through the whole bede roll of inferior
oracles, until he comes to :

Our Lady that standeth in the oak.

While he is still vaunting the extent of his excursions,
as a modern globe-trotter might do, the Pardoner
breaks in upon him :

And when ye have gone as far as ye can.
For all your labour and ghostly intent,
Ye will come home as wise as ye went.

This ruffles the Palmer's pride and self-esteem. Is
the fame of his achievement nothing ? Is the palm
for which he has been travailing, of no avail ? The
Pardoner says : Nay, your object was a worthy one ;
the saving of your soul is a great matter ; it is not for

1 92 SNA KSPERE 'S PREDECKSSORS.

a man of my trade to cheapen his own wares. But
consider the thing calmly :

Now mark in this what wit ye have,
To seek so far, and help so nigh !
Even here at home is remedy ;
For at your door myself doth dwell.
Who could have saved your soul as well
As all your wide wandering shall do,
Though ye went thrice to Jericho.

This is the very argument which the Pardoning
Friar in Ariosto's *Scolastica* uses to Don Bartolo.
That conscience-burdened jurisconsult was minded to
make a pilgrimage to Compostella for his soul's peace.
The Friar told him he was little better than a fool.
By laying out on pardons considerably less than his
journey money, he might stay at home and be saved
at ease. The Palmer in our Interlude makes much the
same reply to the Pardoner as Don Bartolo made to
the Friar :

Right seldom is it seen, or never,
That truth and pardoners dwell together.
For be your pardons never so great.
Yet them to enlarge ye will not let
With such lies that ofttimes, Christ wot.
Ye seem to have that ye have not
Wherefore I went myself to the self thing
In every place, and without saying
Had as much pardon there assuredly.
As ye can promise me here doubtfully.

The Palmer preferred the real article — pardons at
the shrine, however toilfully obtained, to pardons
signed and sealed by Papal licences. He was in the
position of an invalid who travels to drink the waters
at the s pring, instead of taking them corked and
bottled in his sick-room. In spite of brands upon the

THE PALMER. 193

cork and labels on the bottle, those mineral waters are
so often manufactured ! This metaphor will hold good
for the whole business of pardoning. Special virtue
emanated from the bodies of martyrs, relics of con-
fessors, tombs of saints, the person of the Pope him-
self in Rome. These were the salutiferous fountains,
where gout and leprosy of soul were cured.* At first
it was reckoned indispensable to drink those spiritual
waters at the source. But the princes of the Church,
like the possessors of the Carlsbad or S. Moritz
springs, soon perceived what means of profit lay within
their grasp. To draw off the virtues of the saints, to tap
the apostolic spring of grace perennially flowing from
S. Peter s chair, to cork them up in flasks and phials
at Rome, and to label them with Papal Bulls, was easy
and convenient. Everybody profited by the trans-
action. The waters of salvation were brought to the
sick souFs door by agents who returned a handsome
profit to the owners, after pocketing a fair commission for
themselves. But who could be certain that the bottled
Carlsbad, or the S. Moritz, warranted to stimulate a
drooping faith, were genuine ? There lay the difficulty.
And until the world was satisfied upon this point,
which in plain truth it could never be, hardier invalids,
like our Palmer, preferred to travel to the holy wells
themselves.

The Pardoner, in his turn, is not unreasonably
nettled by the Palmers sneers. If it be a question of
truth or untruth, says he, your traveller s tales are at
least as likely to be spurious as my Indulgences :

I say yet again my pardons are such,

That if there were a thousand souls on heap,

rv4 SifAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

I would bring them all to heaven as good cheap

As ye have brought yourself on pilgrimage

In the least quarter of your voyaire, —

Which is far aside heaven, by ikxi !

There your labour and pardon is odd.

With small cost and without any pain.

These pardons bring them to heaven plain :

Give me but a penny or two pence.

And as soon as the soul departeth hence.

In half an hour, or three-quarters at the most.

The soul is in heaven with the Holv Ghost

No sooner has the sleek charlatan made this
astonishing assertion, than a third personage, starting
up at his elbow, puts a word in very quietly.

Send ye any souls to heaven by water ?

This is the Poticar)'. who, observing that the Par-
doner and Palmer are disputing which of them sends
souls the quickest and the safest way to heaven, puts in
a word for his own profession. Few folk came into
the world without a midwife : few go out of it without
a Poticar)'. Thieves, indeed, are hanged. But, quoth
he :

Whom have ye known die honestly,
Without help of the Poticary ?

The contention, like a fugue or canon, has now
thrf!e voices in full cry, pursuing the same theme ;
when a fourth joins in. This is the Pedlar. His
entrance occasions a pause and a momentary diversion ;
for he has to show his wares : and his wares suggest
a somewhat unedifying but humorous debate on women.
After this excursion into a region of discourse, where
tongues of men are wont to wag, the three disputants
return to their original contention ; and the Pedlar

THE PEDLAR, 195

undertakes to play the part of umpire. Having no
experience in spiritual things, he suggests that each of
the plaintiffs should make trial of his skill in a matter,
of which all alike are masters, and he is eminently
qualified to judge. Let them tell lies against each other.

Now have I found one mastery,

That ye can do indifferently ;

And is neither selling nor buying,

But even on very lying.

And all ye three can lie as well

As can the falsest devil in hell.

And though, afore, ye heard me grudge

In greater matters to be your judge,

Yet in lying I can some skill.

And if I shall be judge, I will.

The two competitors assent to the fairness of this
proposal. But before they proceed to trial. Hey wood
contrives to introduce a burlesque scene, which serves
to bring the Pardoner and Poticary into strong con-
trast As the Pedlar had exhibited the contents of his
pack — points, pin-cases, gloves, laces, thimbles, and so
forth ; so now the Pardoner undoes his wallet and
produces the relics it contains. The pursy rogue, who
thrives on superstition and half believes his own im-
postures, brings to sight

Of All Hallows' the blessed jawbone . . .

The great toe of the Trinity . . .

The bees that stang Eve under the forbidden tree . . .

A buttock- bone of Pentecost . . .

and many more absurdities, on which the Poticary, as

a man of sense and science, passes caustic sceptical

remarks. When the toe, for instance, is held up to

admiration, he observes :

o 2

196 SHAKSPERK'S PREDECESSORS.

I pray you turn that relic about !
Either the Trinity had the gout,
Or else, because it is three toes in one,
God made it as much as three toes alone.

The Pardoner, too merry to be much offended, points
out that this relic would be handy for a man with the
toothache. He might roll it in his mouth. But the
Poticary, with the scepticism which has always marked
the medical profession, prefers his own drugs to these
unsavoury panaceas. This gives him an opportunity
of displaying his medicine chest, which he does with
comical bravado, winding up with an attempt to bribe
the judge by the offer of a box of marmalade.

The Pedlar protests his incorruptibility, and the
plaintiffs fall to their contention in good earnest. The
Poticary is within an ace of winning the cause by
assault. His first shot is a fair one ; for, turning to the
Pedlar, he exclaims :

Forsooth, ye be an honest man !

This wakes the fugue up, and the trial is carried
briskly on upon the theme suggested by the obviously
false imputation of honesty to the Pedlar. Arguments
on all three sides are subtly pleaded ; but the umpire
expresses his inability to decide the suit in this way.
Each of the contending parties must tell some tale :

And which of you telleth most marvel,
And most unlikcst to be true,
Shall most prevail, whatever ensue.

The Poticary starts with an extraordinary cure he
made ; too gross in details for discussion.^

^ The humour of this cure is of an American type. ' Its point consists

,'C / ' ' .V" ^ I

THE PARDONER'S TALE, 197

The Pardoner takes up with the far better tale of
how he saved the soul

Of one departed within this seven year,
A friend of mine, and likewise I
To her again was as friendly.

The poor woman had died suddenly without ghostly
comfort or viaticum of any sort. Her sad case weighed
heavily upon the Pardoner s conscience ; and bethink-
ing him how many souls he had saved in his day,
the least he could do was to go to Purgatory and
look after her. When he arrived there, he was right
welcome ; but he could not find his friend :

Then feared I much it was not well ;
Alas ! thought I, she is in hell ;
For with her life I was so acquainted,
That sure I thought she was not sainted.

So after scattering a few pardons, and helping out
a kindly soul, who blessed him when he chanced to
sneeze, the Pardoner proceeded on his journey to hell-
gate. The porter, as it happened, was an old ac-
quaintance :

He knew me well, and I at last
Remembered him since long time past :
For, as good hap would have it chance.
This devil and I were of old acquaintance ;
For oft, in the play of ' Corpus Christi,'
He hath played the devil at Coventry.

By the help of this opportune friend at court, the
Pardoner received a safe-conduct from head-quarters,
and was introduced at a favourable moment to the

in a comical exaggeration of the effect produced by common causes,
playing on the sense of space.

198 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

great Duke of Hell. It was the anniversary of
Lucifer's fall from heaven, and the devils were keep-
ing high tide and festival :

This devil and I walked arm in arm
So far till he had brought me thither,
Where all the devils of hell together
Stood in array in such apparel
As for that day there meetly fell : —
Their horns well gilt, their claws full clean,
Their tails well kempt, and, as I ween,
With sothery butter their bodies anointed :
I never saw devils so well appointed !
The master-devil sat in his jacket.
And all the souls were playing at racket:
None other rackets they had in hand
Save every soul a good firebrand ;
Wherewith they played so prettily
That Lucifer laughed merrily.
And all the residue of the fiends
Did laugh thereat full well like friends.

•

The Pardoner looked around for his friend, but
could not find her, and durst not yet ask after her.
An usher then brought him into the presence of
Lucifer, who received him graciously :

By Saint Anthony
He smiled on me well-favouredly.
Bending his brows as broad as barn-doors.
Shaking his ears as rugged as burrs.
Rolling his eyes as round as two bushels.
Flashing the fire out of his nostrils.
Gnashing his teeth so vaingloriously
That methought time to fall to flattery.

Neither low obeisance nor seasonable panegyric did
the Pardoner spare ; and after some preliminary col-
loquy, he ventured to unfold the object of his visit :

I am a Pardoner,
And over souls as controller

RESCUE OF MARGERY CORSON. 199

Throughout the earth my power doth stand,
Where many a soul lieth on my hand,
That speed in matters as I use them,
As I receive them or refuse them.

Such being the authority of his office, he proposes
to exchange the soul of any wight alive the devil
chooses for that of his friend. Lucifer agrees :

Ho, ho ! quoth the devil, we are well pleased !

What is his name thou wouldst have eased ?

Nay, quoth I, be it good or evil,

My coming is for a she devil.

Wliat call'st her, quoth he, thou whoreson ?

Forsooth, quoth I, Margery Corson.

This demure and casual introduction of the woman's
name strikes one as highly comic, after so much pre-
paration ; and the immediate effect produced is no less
dramatic. Lucifer forgets all about the bargain, and
swears that not a devil in hell shall withhold her :

And if thou wouldest have twenty mo,
Wer^t not for justice, they should go !
For all we devils within this den
Have more to do with two women
Than with all the charge we have beside.

He therefore begs the Pardoner, by good-will and
fellowship, to leave the men to their sins, and to apply
all his pardons in future to womankind, in order that
hell at least may be rid of the sex. Margery had
been drafted into the kitchen, and there the Pardoner
found her, spitting the meat, basting and roasting it.

But when she saw this brought to pass.
To tell the joy wherein she was,
And of all the devils, for joy how they
Did roar at her deliver)',

200 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

And how the chains in hell did ring,
And how all the souls therein did sing,
And how we were brought to the gate,
And how we took our leave thereat,
Be sure lack of time suffereth not
To rehearse the twentieth part of that !

The gratification afforded by the Pardoner's story
almost distracts attention from its lie. The Pedlar
comments on the danger of the journey. The Palmer
takes it seriously ; but one point, he says, perplexes
him. He cannot understand why women have such
bad characters in hell. He has wandered over earth
and sea, and visited every town in Christendom :

And this I would ye should understand,
I have seen women five hundred thousand ;
And oft with them have long time tarried,
Yet in all places where I have been.
Of all the women that I have seen,
I never saw or knew in my conscience
Any one woman out of patience.

Thus quietly, and with this force of earnest assevera-
tion, does the largest and most palpable lie leap out
of the Palmer's lips. The plaintiffs and the judge are
unanimous :

Poticary,
By the mass, there is a great lie 1

Pardoner.
I never heard a greater, by our Lady I

Pedlar,
A greater ! Nay, know ye any so great ?

It only remains for the Pedlar to pass judgment, and
to assign the prize of victor}' to the Palmer. This he
does at some length, discoursing with comical details

THE PALMERS TRIUMPH. 201

upon the composition of woman's character, and de-
monstrating how shrewishness, whatever other quali-
ties may co-exist, is a fixed element in every member
of the female sex. The Interlude concludes with a
sound and wholesome homily from the stout-hearted
old author, put into the Pedlar's mouth, whereby he
expounds his own views about the right use of pil-
grimage and pardons, and lectures the materialistic
apothecary upon the necessity of saving virtues. Thus
the fun of the piece is turned to good doctrine at its
close.

I have indulged myself in a detailed analysis of
Hey wood's Interlude, and in copious quotations, partly
because of its intrinsic excellence, but more especially
because it is unique as a dramatic composition of the
purest English style, unmodified by erudite or foreign
elements. It presents the England of the pre- Renais-
sance and pre- Reformation period with singular vivacity
and freshness ; the merry England which had still a
spark of Chaucer's spirit left, an echo of his lark-like
morning song. The Drama was not destined to
expand precisely on the lines laid down by Heywood.
Indeed, a very few years made his Interlude almost as
archaic to the men of Elizabeth's reign as it is to us.
Italian and classical influences were already at work in
the elaboration of a different type of art. Still the
vigour of this piece is so superabundant, that to neglect
it would be to leave out of account the chief factor —
native dramatic faculty — which rendered our play-
wrights in the modern style superior to those of Italy
or France.

202 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

IV.

Two formal comedies of an early date may be fitly
included in this study. These are * Ralph Roister
Doister' and ' Gammer Gurton's Needle.' Heywoods
' Four P's ' was written, in all probability, soon after
the year 1530. * Roister Doister' had been produced
to the public before 1550. 'Gammer Gurton' was
acted at Cambridge in 1566. These dates bring three
epoch-making compositions in the comic art almost
within the compass of a quarter of a century. No
serious dramatic essays, tragedies, or histories, of like
artistic excellence existed at that period.

To combine a skilfully constructed fable with
Heywood's character-delineation was all that comedy
required to bring it to maturity. This union Nicholas
Udall effected in his * Ralph Roister Doister.' The
author of this, the first regular comedy in^the English
language, was born about 1505 in Hampshire. He
was a Protestant throughout his life, and won some
scholarly distinction by translating portions of the
Paraphrase of the New Testament by Erasmus. While
a student at Oxford, Udall enjoyed Leland's intimacy.
Bale praised him for his learning and accomplish-
ments. For some time he held the head mastership
of Eton College, which he had to resign on a charge,
not fully proved, of conniving at a robbery of College
plate. He died in 1556, having been for a few years
before his death head master of Westminster School.
This sketch of Udall's biography prepares us for the
taste, propriety of treatment, and just proportions

UD ALL'S 'ROISTER DOISTER: 203

which we find in his dramatic work. * Ralph Roister
Doister/ however unpromising its title may be, is the
composition of a scholar, who has studied Terence and
Plautus to good purpose. From the Latin playwrights
Udall learned how to construct a plot, and to digest
the matter of his fable into five acts. The same
models of style gave him that ease of movement and
simplicity of diction which make his work, in spite of
superficial archaisms, classical. In ' Roister Doister'
we emerge from medieval grotesquery and allegory
into the clear light of actual life, into an agreeable
atmosphere of urbanity and natural delineation. Udall
avoided the error of imitating his Roman master too
closely. He neither borrowed his fable nor his persons,
as was the wont of the Italian comedians, straight from
Plautus. His play is founded, indeed, upon the * Miles
Gloriosus ; ' but it is free from that unpleasant taint of
unreality which mars the Covimedia erudita of the
Florentines. The antique plot has been accommodated
to a simple episode of English life among people of the
comfortable middle class. The hero, Ralph Doister, is
a braggart and a coward ; well to do, but foolish in his
use of wealth ; boastful before proof, but timid in the
hour of trial ; ridiculously vain of his appearance, with
a trick of dangling after any woman whom chance
throws in his way. A parasite and boon companion,
called Matthew Merigreek, turns him round his finger
by alternate flatteries and bullyings. This character
Udall owed to the Latin theatre ; but he combined the
popular qualities of the Vice with the conventional
attributes of the classic parasite, contriving at the same
time to create a real personage, who would have been at

204 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

home in ordinary English households. The name Meri-
greek seems to point to Juvenal's * Graeculus Esuriens ; '
it has also something in common with the abstract titles
of the Vice in the Moralities. This clever knave dis-
covers that Ralph is in love with a widow, Dame Cus-
tance, who is betrothed to the merchant Gawin Good-
luck. While Goodluck is away upon a voyage, Ralph and
Merigreek pester the widow with love-letters, tokens,
serenades, and visits. Her opinion of Ralph is that he
is a contemptible coxcomb, not worth an honest woman's
notice. She therefore treats his wooing as a joke ; but
finding that she cannot shake him off, makes the best
fun she can out of the circumstances. This gives a
colour of familiarity to his attentions ; and a servant of
Goodluck s appearing suddenly upon the scene while
Ralph's courtship is in full progress, arouses his master's
jealousy. Dame Custance is now placed in a difficult
position, from which she is finally extricated by the
testimony of an old friend, who was acquainted with
her behaviour in the matter, and also by the cowardly
admissions of the simpleton Ralph. Thus this slight
story contains the principal elements of a comedy —
ridiculous as well as serious characters ; laughable inci-
dents ; temporary misunderstandings ; a perplexity in
the fourth act ; and a happy adjustment of all difficulties
\ by the self-exposure of the mischief-making braggart.
The conduct of the piece is spirited and easy. The
author s art, though refined by scholarship, is homely.
Between ' Ralph Roister Doister ' and * The Merry
Wives of Windsor' there is, in point of construction
and conception, no immeasurable distance, although the
one play is the work of mediocrity, the other of genius.

STILLS 'GAMMER GURTONJ 20$

' Gammer Gurton s Needle * has been hitherto
ascribed, on slender but not improbable grounds of
inference, to John Still. He was a native of Lincoln-
shire, who received his education at Christ's College,
Cambridge. After enjoying a canonry at Westminster
and the masterships of S. Johns and Trinity at
Cambridge, he was promoted to the Bishopric of Bath
and Wells in 1592. His effigy may still be seen
beneath its canopy in Wells Cathedral. A grim
Puritan divine, with pointed beard and long stiff
painted robes, lies face-upward on the monument.
This is the author of the first elaborately executed
farce in our language. * Gammer Gurton's Needle * is
a humorous and vulgar picture of the lowest rustic
manners, dashed in with coarse bold strokes in tell-
ing realistic style. Its chief merit as a play is the
crescendo of its interest, ending in a burlesque d^-
nouement. Unlike ' Ralph Roister Doister,' it has no
plot, properly so called, and owes nothing to the Latin
stage. We may rather regard it as a regular develop-
ment from one of the comic scenes interpolated in the
Miracles. Gammer Gurton loses her needle; and
Diccon the Bedlam, who is peeping and prying about
the cottage, accuses Dame Chat, the alewife, of
stealing it. This sets all the village by the ears.
One by one the various authorities, parson, baily,
constables, are drawn into the medley. Heads are
broken ; ancient feuds are exacerbated ; the confusion
seems hopeless, when the needle is found sticking in

2o6 SHAKSPEKE'S PREDECESSORS.

the breeches of Hodge, the Gammers farm-servant
Diccon the Bedlam, who raised and controlled the
storm, may be compared to the Vice of the Moralities,
inasmuch as all the action turns upon him. But he
has nothing in common with abstractions. He is a
vigorously executed portrait of a personage familiar
enough in England at that epoch. After the dissolu-
tion of the monasteries, no provision was made for the
poor folk who used to live upon their doles. A crowd
of idle and dissolute beggars were turned loose upon
the land, to live upon their wits. The cleverer of
these affected madness, and got the name of Bedlam
Beggars, Abraham Men, and Poor Toms. Shakspere
has described them in ' King Lear : '

The country gives me proof and precedent,
Of bedlam beggars who, with roaring voices.
Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms,
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,
And with this horrible object from low farms.
Poor pelting villages, slieei)cotes, and mills.
Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with i)rayers.
Enforce their charity.

Dekker in one of his tracts introduces us to the
confraternity of wandering rogues in the following
curious passage : * Of all the mad rascals, that are of
this wing, the Abraham Man is the most fantastic.
The fellow that sat half-naked, at table to-day, from
the girdle upwards, is the best Abraham Man that
ever came to my house, and the notablest villain. He
swears he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk franti-
cally of purpose. You see pins stuck in sundry places
of his naked flesh, especially in his arms, which pain
he gladly puts himself to (being indeed no torment at

DICCOX THE BEDLAM, 207

all, his skin is either so dead with some foul disease
or so hardened with weather) only to make you believe
he is out of his wits. He calls himself by the name of
Poor Tom, and coming near anybody cries out, " Poor
Tom is a-ccld ! " ' These vagrants wandered up and
down the country, roosting in hedge-rows, creeping
into barns, extorting bacon from farm-servants by
intimidation, amusing the company in rural inns by
their mad jests, stealing and bullying, working upon
superstition, pity, terror, or the love of the ridiculous
in all from whom they could obtain a livelihood.
How Shakspere used this character to heighten the
tragedy of * Lear,* requires no comment. Still em-
ployed the same character in working out a purely
farcical intrigue. His Diccon is simply a clever and
amusing vagabond.

It is worthy of notice that 'Gammer Gurton's
Needle' was played at Christ s College, with the
sanction of the authorities, in 1566. We might won-
der how grave scholars could appreciate the buffoonery
of this coarse art, which has neither the intrigue of
Latin comedy nor the polish of classic style to recom-
mend it. Yet, if the intellectual conditions of the
time are taken into account, our wonder will rather be
that * Roister Doister ' should have been written than
that ' Gammer Gurton ' should have been enjoyed.
The fine arts had no place in England. Literature
hardly existed, and the study of the classics was as yet
confined to a few scholars. Formal logic and the
philosophy of the schoolmen occupied the graver
thou<rhts of academical students. When those learned
men abandoned themselves to mirth, they relished

2o8 SHAICSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

obscenity and grossness with the same gusto as the
cheese and ale and onions of their supper table. Nor
let it be forgotten that the urbane Pope of the House
of Medici, the pupil of Poliziano, the patron of
Raphael, could turn from Beroaldo's ' Tacitus * and
Bembo s courtly elegiacs, to split his sides with laugh-
ing at Bibbiena s ribaldries. Allowing for the differ-
ences between Italy and England, the *Calandria' is
hardly more refined than * Gammer Gurton's Needle/
Beneath its classical veneer and smooth Italian varnish,
it hides as coarse a view of human nature and a nastier
fable.

VI.

There are many reasons why Comedy should
have preceded Tragedy in the evolution of our Drama.
The comic scenes, which formed a regular department
of the Miracle, allowed themselves to be detached
from the whole scheme. From the first they were
extraneous to the sacred subject-matter of those
Pageants ; and after passing through the intermediate
stage of the Morality, they readily blent with Latin
models (as in the case of ' Roister Doister '), and no
less readily setded into the form of the five-act farce
(as in the case of * Gammer Gurton *). Comedy at-
tracts an uninstructed audience more powerfully than
Tragedy. Of this we have plenty of evidence in our
own days ; when * the better vulgar ' crowd the Music
Halls, and gather to Burlesques, but barely lounge at
fashion's beck to a Shaksperian Revival. Comedy of
the average type can be more easily invented than
Tragedy. It appeals to a commoner intelligence. It

PRIORITY OF COMIC DRAMA. 209

deals with more familiar motives. Lastly, but by no
means least, it makes far slighter demands upon the
capacity of actors. Passing over into caricature, it is
not only tolerable, but oftentimes enhanced in effect.
Whereas Tragedy, hyperbolised — Herod out- H erod-
ing Herod, Ercles' and Cambyses' vein— becomes
supremely ridiculous to those very sympathies which
Tragedy appeals to. Among the Northern nations gro-
tesqueness was indigenous. They found buffoonery
ready to their hand. For the statelier and sterner
forms of dramatic art, models were needed. What the
Teutonic genius originated in the serious style, was
epical ; connected with the minstrels rather than the
jongleur s skill. Comedy, again, was better fitted than
Tragedy to fill up the spaces of a banquet or to crown
a revel. The jongleurs and jugglers, who descended
from the Roman histriones, had their proper place in
medieval society ; and these jesters were essentially
mimes. Comedy belonged of right to them. Every
dais in the hall of manor-house or castle had from
immemorial time furnished forth a comic stage. The
Court-fools were public characters. Sumner, Will
Kempe, Tarleton, and Wilson were as well known to
our ancestors of the sixteenth century as Garrick and
the Kembles to our greatgrandfathers. The occa-
sional and extemporaneous jesting of these men passed
by degrees into settled types of presentation. They
wrote, or had written for them, Merriments, which
they enriched with sallies of the choicest gag, illus-
trated with movements of the most fantastic humour.
When formal plays came into fashion by the labour of
the learned, these professional comedians struck the

2IO SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

key-note of character, and took a prominent part in all
performances. From what we know about private or
semi-private theatricals in our own days, we are able
furthermore to comprehend how anxiously young gentle-
men at College, or fashionable members of an Inn of
Court, would imitate the gestures of a Tarleton ; how
pliantly the scholar-playwright would adapt his leading
comic motive to the humours of a Kempe. It was thus
through many co-operating circumstances that Comedy
took the start of Tragedy upon the English stage.
The graver portions of the Miracles, the heavier parts
of the Moral Plays, meanwhile, developed a school of
acting which made Tragedy possible. The public by
these antecedents were educated to tolerate a serious
style of art. But the playwright's genius — adequate to
a first-rate Interlude like the * Four P's,' to a first-rate
Comedy of manners like ' Roister Doister,* to a first-
rate screaming farce like * Gammer Gurton * — was still
unequal to the task of a true tragic piece.

211

CHAPTER VI.

THE RISE OF TRAGEDY.

I. Classical Influence in England — The Revival of Learning — English
Humanism— Ascham's * Schoolmaster* — Italian Examples. — II. The
Italian Drama — Paramount Authority of Seneca — Character of
Seneca's Plays. — III. English Translations of Seneca — English
Translations of Italian Plays. — IV. English Adaptations of the Latin
Tragedy — Lord Brooke — Samuel Daniel — Translations from theFrench
— Latin Tragedies — False Dramatic Theor)'. — V. * Gorboduc * — Sir
Philip Sidney's Eulogy of it — Lives of Sackville and Norton — General
Character of this Tragedy — Its Argument — Distribution of Material
— Chorus — Dumb Show — The Actors — Useof Blank Verse. — VI. *The
Misfortunes of Arthur' — Thomas Hughes and Francis Bacon — The
Plot — Its Adaptation to the Graico-Roman Style of Tragedy — Part
of Guenevora — The Ghost — Advance on * Gorboduc ' in Dramatic Force
and Versification. — VII. Failure of this Pseudo-Classical Attempt —
What it effected for English Tragedy.

N.B. The two chief tragedies discussed in this chapter will be found
in the old Shakespeare Society's Publications, 1847, and in Hazlitt's
Dodsley^ voL iv.

The history of our Tragic Drama is closely connected
with that of an attempt to fix the rules of antique
composition on the playwright's art in England. Up
to the present point we have been dealing with those
religious pageants, which the English shared in com-
mon with other European nations during the Middle
Ages, and with a thoroughly native outgrowth from
them in our Moral Plays and Comedies. The debt,
already indicated, of *Jack Juggler* to the 'Amphi-
tryon ' of Plautus, and that of ' Roister Doister ' to the

p 2

212 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

' Miles Gloriosus/ together with a very early English
version of the * Andria * of Terence, prove, however,
that classical studies were beginning to affect our
theatre even in the period of its origins. To trace the
further and far more pronounced influence of these
studies on tragic poetry, will be the object of this
chapter. I shall have to show in what way, when
men of culture turned their attention to the stage, a
determined effort was made to impose the canons of
classical art, as they were then received in Southern
Europe, on our playwrights ; how the genius of the
people proved too strong for the control of critics and
* courtly makers ; * how the romantic drama triumphed
over the pseudo-classic type of comedy and tragedy ;
and how England, by these means, was delivered
from a danger which threatened her theatre with a
failure like to that of the Italian.

The Revival of Learning may be said to have
begun in Italy early in the fourteenth century, when
Petrarch, by his study of Cicero, and Boccaccio, by
his exploration of Greek literature, prepared the way
for discoverers of MSS. like Poggio and Filelfo,
for founders of libraries like Nicholas V. and
Cosimo de* Medici, for critics and translators like
Lorenzo Valla, for poets like Poliziano, for editors
like Aldus Manutius, and for writers on philosophy
like Ficino and Cristofero Landino. A new type of
education sprang up in the universities and schools of
Italy, supplanting the medieval curriculum of Grammar,
Rhetoric, and Logic by a wider and more genial study
of the Greek and Latin authors. This education, re-
duced to a system by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua,

HUMANISM IN ENGLAND, 213

and developed in detail by wandering professors, who
attracted scholars from all countries to their lectures
in the universities of Padua and Bologna, Florence
and Siena, rapidly spread over Europe. Grocin
(1442-1519) and Linacre (1460-1524) transplanted the
study of Greek from Italy to Oxford, whence it spread
to Cambridge. The royal family and the great nobles
of England, vying with the aristocracy of Mantua and
Milan, instituted humanistic tutors for their sons and
daughters. The children of Henry VIII., the Prince
Edward and the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, grew
up accomplished in both ancient languages. Lady Jane
Grey preferred the perusal of Plato's * Phaedo ' in her
study to a hunting party in her father's park. Queen
Elizabeth at Windsor turned from consultations with
Cecil on the affairs of France and Spain to read
Demosthenes with Ascham. Sir Thomas More at
Westminster, Dean Colet at S. Pauls, Sir John Cheke
at Cambridge, and the illustrious foreign friends of
these men, among whom the first place must be given
to Erasmus, formed as brilliant a group of classical
scholars, at the opening of the sixteenth century, as
could be matched in Europe. Meanwhile large sums
were being spent on educational foundations ; by
Wolsey at Christ Church, by Edward VI. in the
establishment of grammar schools, by Colet in his
endowment of S. Paul's, and by numerous benefactors
to whom we owe our present system of high class
public education. A race of excellent teachers sprang
into notice, among whom it may suffice to mention
Nicholas Udall, Roger Ascham, William Camden, Elmer
the tutor of Lady Jane Grey, and Cheke the lecturer

214 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

on Greek at Cambridge. English gentlemen, at this
epoch, were scholars no less than soldiers, men of
whom the type is brilliantly represented by Sir Walter
Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney. English gentlewomen
shared the studies of their brothers ; and if a Lady Jane
Grey was rare, a Countess of Pembroke and a Princess
Mary may be taken as the leaders of a numerous class.^
Of the humanistic culture which prevailed in
England, we possess a vigorous and vivid picture in
the * Schoolmaster ' of Ascham. Imported from Italy,
where it had flourished for at least a century before it
struck its first roots in our soil, this culture retained
a marked Italian character. But in the middle of
the sixteenth century Italian scholarship had already
begun to decay. Learning, exclaimed Paolo Giovio,
is fled beyond the Alps. The more masculine
branches of erudition were neglected for academical
frivolities. The study of Greek languished. It
seemed as though the Italians were satiated and
exhausted with the efforts and enthusiasms of two
centuries. In the North, curiosity was still keen.
The speculative freedom of the Reformation movement
kept the minds of men alert to studies which taxed
intellectual energy. And though the methods of edu-
cation, both in public schools and in private tuition,
were borrowed from the practice of Italian professors,
no class of professional rhetoricians corresponding to
the Humanists corrupted English morals, no learned
bodies like the academies of the South dictated laws to

* See the note on female education by Nicholas Udall in his preface
to Erasmus' Paraphrase of S. John, translated together with him by the
Princess Mary and the Rev. F. Malet, D.D. It will be found in Prof.
Arber's Introductions to Ralph Roister Doistcr^ p. 4.

ITALIAN INFLUENCES. 215

taste, or imposed puerilities on erudition. Society in
general was far simpler ; the Court purer ; manners
less artificial ; religion more influential in controlling
conduct. Sidney furnished a living illustration of
Ascham's precepts ; and no one who should compare
the life of Sidney with that of a contemporary Italian
of his class, would fail to appreciate the specifically
English nature of this typical gentleman.

Still, though English culture was now independent,
though English scholars held the keys of ancient
learning and unlocked its treasures for themselves,
though English thinkers drew their own philosophy
from original sources, while the character of an accom-
plished Englishman differed from that of an Italian
by superior manliness, simplicity, sincerity, and moral
soundness ; yet the example of Italy was felt in all
departments of study, in every branch of intellec-
tual activity. Three centuries ahead of us in mental
training ; with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and
Tasso already on their list of classics ; boasting a multi-
farious literature of novels, essays, comedies, pastorals,
tragedies, and lyrics ; with their great histories of Guic-
ciardini and Machiavelli ; with their political philosophy
and metaphysical speculations ; the Italians — as it was
inevitable — swayed English taste, and moved the poets
of England to imitation. Surrey and Wyat introduced
the sonnet and blank verse from Italy into England.
Spenser wrote the * Faery Queen* under the influence
of the Italian romantic epics. Raleigh could confer
no higher praise on this great poem than to say that
Petrarch's ghost, no less than Homers, was moved
thereby to weeping for his laurels. Sidney copied the

2i6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Italians in his lyrics, and followed Sannazzaro in the
'Arcadia.' The bookstalls of London were flooded
with translations of loose Italian novels, to such an
extent that Ascham trembled for the morals of his
countrymen.^ Harrington's Ariosto, Fairfax's Tasso,
Hoby's Cortigiano, proved that the finer products of
Italian literature were not neglected. This absorbing
interest in the creations of Italian genius was kept
alive and stimulated by the almost universal habit
of sending youths of good condition on an Italian
journey. It was thought that residence for some
months in the chief Italian capitals was necessary
to complete a young man's education ; and though
jealous moralists might shake their heads, averring that
English lads exchanged in Italy their learning for lewd
living, their religious principles for atheism, their patriot-
ism for Machiavellian subtleties, their simplicity for
affectations in dress and manners, and their manliness
for vices hitherto unknown in England, yet the custom
continued to prevail, until at last, in the reign of the
first Stuart, the English Court competed for the prize
of immorality with the Courts of petty Southern princes.

II.

Trained in classical studies, and addicted to
Italian models, it was natural enough that those men
of letters who sought to acclimatise the lyric poetry
of the Italians, who translated their novels, and adopted
the style of their romance, should not neglect the
tragic drama. This had long ago established itself as

* See Schoolmaster^ ed. Mayor, pp. 8i, 82.

CLASSICAL MODELS. 217

a branch of the higher literature in Italy. Mussato
in the first years of the fourteenth century, with his
Latin tragedy on the history of Eccelino da Romano ;
Trissino in 15 15, with his Italian 'Sofonisba;' Rucellai
at the same epoch, with ' Rosmunda ; ' Speron Sperone,
Cinthio Giraldi, Lodovico Dolce, Luigi Alamanni,
Giannandrea dell' Anguillara, Lodovico Martelli, in
the next two decades, with their * Canace,' * Orbecche,*
'Giocasta,* * Antigone,' * Edippo,' 'Tullia;' all these
Italian poets wrote, printed, and performed tragedies
with vast applause upon the private and the courtly
theatres of Italy. That England should remain without
such compositions, struck the 'courtly makers' as a para-
dox. The English had their own dramatic traditions,
their companies of players, their interludes in the ver-
nacular, their masques and morris-dances and pageants;
in a word, all the apparatus necessary. It only remained
for men of polite culture to engraft the roses of the
classic and Italian styles upon this native briar.
Reckoning after this fashion, but reckoning without
their host, the public, as the sequel proved, courtiers
and students at the Inns of Court began to pen
tragedies. Under Italian guidance, they took the
classics for their models. The authority of Italian
playwrights, incompetent in such affairs, enslaved
these well-intentioned persons to a classic of the silver
age ; to Seneca, instead of the great Attic authors.
Every tragic scene which the Italians of the Renais-
sance set forth upon the boards of Rome or Florence
or Ferrara, was a transcript from Seneca. Following
this lead, our English scholars went to school with
Seneca beneath the ferule of Italian ushers.

2i8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Seneca's collected works include eight complete
tragedies, two fragments of tragic plays, and one com-
plete piece in the same style, but posterior to the
author. The eight dramas are : ' Hercules Furens/

* Thyestes,' * Phaedra,' * CEdipus,' the ' Troades,*

* Medea,* * Agamemnon,' and * Hercules upon Mount
QEta.' The fragments of an CEdipus at Colonus and
a Phoenissae have been pieced together to make up a

* Thebais/ The later play, belonging to Seneca s tradi-
tion, is a tragedy upon the subject of Octavia. With
the exception of the last, all these so-called dramas are
a rhetorician's reproduction of Greek tragedies. So-
phocles and Euripides, familiar to that rhetoricians
learned audience, have been laid under contribution.
But he has invented for himself a sphere of treatment,
apart from the real drama, and apart from translation.
It was Seneca's method to rehandle the world- worn
matter of the Greek tragedians in the form of a dramatic
commentary. Instead of placing characters upon the
stage in conflict, he used his persons as mere mouthpieces
for declamation and appropriate reflection. Instead of
developing the fable by action, he expanded the part of
the Messenger, and gave the rein to his descriptive
faculty. For a Roman audience, in the age of Nero,
this new species of dramatic poetry furnished a fresh
kind of literary pleasure. They had the old situations of
Greek tragedy presented to them indirectly, in long
monologues adorned with sophistical embroidery, in
laboured descriptions, where the art of the narrator
brought events familiar to all students of Greek plays
and Graeco-Roman painting forth in a new vehicle of
polished verse. Rhetoric and the idyll, philosophical

SENECA, 219

analysis and plastic art, forensic eloquence and scholas-
tic disputation, were skilfully applied to touch at a
dramatic point the intellectual sense of men and
women trained by education and the habits of imperial
Roman life to all these forms. It is more than doubt-
ful whether the pseudo-tragedies produced upon this
plan were intended for scenical representation. We
have rather reason to believe that they found utterance
in those fashionable recitations, of which the Satirists
have left sufficient notices. Roman ladies and gentle-
men assembled at each other's houses, in each other's
gardens, in clubs and coteries, to applaud a Statius
declaiming his hexameters, or the school of Seneca
reciting their master s studies from the Attic drama.
An audience which could appreciate whole books of
the ' Pharsalia ' or the * Thebais ' at a sitting, may have
gladly enough accepted one of Seneca s orations in two
hundred iambics. A tragedy recited was anyhow less
tedious than a declaimed epic.

Such, however, being the nature of Seneca's tra-
gedies— regarding them, as we are bound to do, in
the light of a decadent, pedantic, reproductive period
of art — ascribing their originality and merit to the
authors sympathy with very special intellectual con-
ditions of his age — it follows that we must condemn
them as pernicious models for incipient literature. Per-
nicious undoubtedly they were in their effect upon the
Italian theatre. At its very outset the authority of
Seneca stifled tragedy and set tragedians on an utterly
false scent. The society of Italy in the sixteenth
century had certain points in common with that of
Neronian Rome. There was the same taste for

220 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

pedantic studies, the same appreciation of forensic
oratory, the same tendency to verbal criticism, the
same confinement of the higher literature to coteries.
Meeting, then, with a congenial soil and atmosphere,
Seneca's mannerism took root and flourished in Italy.
It is not a little amusing to find Giraldi openly express-
ing his opinion that Seneca had improved upon the
Greek tragedians, and to notice how playwrights
thought they were obeying Aristotle, when they made
servile copies of the Corduban's dramatic commen-
taries.^

III.

Between the years 1559 and 1566, five English
authors applied themselves to the task of translating
Seneca. The * Troades,' * Thyestes,' and * Hercules
Furens ' were done by Jasper Hey wood ; the ' CEdi-
pus ' by Alexander Nevyle ; the * Medea,* * Agamem-
non,* * Phaedra,* and 'Hercules on QEta' by John
Studley ; the * Octavia ' by Thomas Nuce ; and the
* Thebais * by Thomas Newton. These ten plays,
collected and printed together in 1581, remain a monu-
ment of English poets* zeal in studying the Roman
pedagogue. In all of these versions rhymed measures
were used ; and the translators allowed themselves
considerable latitude of treatment, adding here and
there, and altering according to their fancy.

The impulse thus given, was soon felt in the pro-
duction of a great variety of classical or classical- Italian
plays. Only two of these call for special notice. But

* Scaliger's and Malherbe's opinions might be quoted to prove that
this strange preference of Seneca was not confined to Italy.

GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 221

before I proceed to their consideration, it will be well to
pass this chapter in the literary history of our Drama in
rapid review, and to notice some of its more prominent
personalities.

George Gascoigne was a gentleman by birth and
education, a member of Gray's Inn, and the author
of many excellent works in prose and verse. In
the year 1566, the society of which he was a member
performed two of his dramatic essays in their hall
of Gray's Inn. These were a translation of Ariosto's

* Suppositi,' and a version of Lodovico Dolce s * Gio-
casta.' The first of these plays has special interest,
since it was the earliest known comedy in English
prose. The 'Jocasta' has hitherto been accepted
by historians of our Drama, following Colliers au-
thority, as a free transcript from the * Phoenissae ' of
Euripides. This it is in substance. But critics have
generally omitted to notice that before the * Phoenissae '
came into the hands of Gascoigne, it had passed
through those of Dolce.^ There is no reason to sup-
pose that Gascoigne was a learned poet ; and the merit
of having adapted a tragedy from the Greek must, I
think, be denied him. If Collier had paid attention to
his own quotations from * Jocasta/ the point would have
been clear. He extracts the speech of a person named
Bailo at the opening of the first act. Bailo is the
Italian translation of the Greek word Paidagogos ; and
what this Bailo says in English, is a tolerably close
rendering of Dolce's addition to the tutor s part in the

* Phoenissae ' of Euripides. Again, in the speech of the
Messenger, Gascoigne follows Dolce, where Dolce has

* See Teatro Antico Italiano^ vol. vi. for Dolce's Giocasta.

222 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

departed from Euripides. My excuse for insisting upon
so insignificant a matter, must be that this * Jocasta ' is
the only early English play for which a Greek source
has been claimed. The truth appears to be that, like
the rest of the classical dramas of that period, it had an
Italian derivation.^

IV.

The study of Seneca made itself apparent in two
tragedies by Fulke Grevile, Lord Brooke. These are
'Alaham* and 'Mustapha;' — Oriental fables treated
in the strictest pseudo-classic style, with conscientious
observance of the unities and other rules for depriving
tragedy of movement. A ghost of one of the old
kings of Ormus prologises in * Alaham.' A Chorus of
Good and Evil Spirits, Furies and Vices, comments
on the action. In ' Mustapha' the Chorus varies : at
one time it consists of Pashas and Cadis ; then of
Mohammedan Priests ; again of Time and Eternity ;
lastly, of Converts to Mohammedanism. These plays,
though printed in Brooke's works as late as 1633,
were certainly composed at a much earlier period. It
is curious that both are written in elaborate rhymed
structure. They had no influence over the develop-
ment of the English Drama, and must be regarded in
the light of ponderous literary studies.

Upon the close of the century, Samuel Daniel, the
sweet lyrist of Delia, set himself in opposition to the
current of popular taste; and blaming *the idle fictions'
and 'gross follies* with which men abused their leisure

* It ought in this connection to be noted that the Plutus of Aristo-
phanes is said to have been performed in Greek before Queen Elizabeth.

LORD BROOKE AND DAXIEL I23

hours, produced two tragedies, ' Philotas ' and ' Cleo-
patra/ to serve as patterns of a purer style. Both, in
the opinion of impartial critics, are apparent failures.
They resemble a dilettante's disquisitions upon tragic
fables rather than tragedies for action. Daniel, in his
determination not to violate the unities, confines
himself to the last hours of Cleopatra's life ; and
rather than disturb the ceremonious decorum of his art,
he introduces a Messenger who relates in polished
phrases how she died. A better instance could not
be chosen than this * Cleopatra,' to prove the im-
potence in England of the pseudo-classic style.
Daniel's tragedy bore points of strong resemblance to
the work of contemporary French playwrights. But
it hardly needed the fierce light from Cleopatra's dying
hours in Shakspere's play to pale its ineffectual fires.
Where Italian and French poets attained to moderate
success in their imitation of antique art, English
dramatists invariably failed. Their failure was due in
no small measure, doubtless, to the fact that their
attempt revealed an undramatic turn of mind. In the
age of Elizabeth and James the born playwright felt
instinctively, felt truly, that the path of Shakspere and
the people was the only path to walk in. Daniel's
'Cleopatra' met with the lukewarm approval of a
lettered audience. His ' Philotas ' was badly received,
not on account of its artistic faults apparently, but
because the audience recognised in its catastrophe
allusions to the fate of Essex.

Daniel, in sympathy with the French authors
whom probably he had in view, adhered to rhyme
The Countess of Pembroke, who translated Garnier's

224 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

'Antony* into English as early as 1590, made some
use of blank verse — a somewhat noticeable fact, since
Marlowe's * Tamburlaine/ which heralded the triumph of
that metre, was first printed in the same year. Another
tragedy of Gamier s, the ' Cornelia/ was translated by
Thomas Kyd, and dedicated in 1 594 to the Countess
of Sussex. It is also in blank verse, of vigorous
quality. It would serve no purpose to enlarge upon
these essays in translation, or to do more than
mention Brandon's * Virtuous Octavia.' They are
only interesting as indicating a continuous revolt
among the literary folk in England against the preva-
lent and overwhelming influence of the romantic or
the native English drama. Doomed to failure, buried
beneath the magna moles of the work of mightier
poets, the historian of literature regards them only as
exceptions and abortions, indicating by their very
failure the organic strength and soundness of the
growth which they attempted to displace.

The same judgment may be passed on numerous
tragedies in the Latin tongue, and performed at
Universities before a courtly audience. The titles
and dates of these productions are in some cases
curious. Thus we find a 'Jephtha' by George
Christopherson, dedicated in 154*6 to Henry VIII.
It preceded George Buchanan's 'Jephtha* by eight
years. A * Dido,' by John Rightwise, was exhibited
in King's College Chapel at Cambridge in 1564 be-
fore Queen Elizabeth. Another *Dido,' by William
Gager, entertained a Polish prince in Christ Church
Hall at Oxford in 1583. An * Ajax Flagellifer,'
adapted probably from Sophocles, was written and got

PLAYS IX LATIN, 225

Up for Queen Elizabeth's amusement at Cambridge in
1564. For some reason, its performance had then to
be abandoned ; but it was played at Oxford In 1605.
The ' Roxana ' of William Alabaster, which was
acted in Trinity College Hall, at Cambridge, about
1592, and printed in 1632, deserves notice for the
praise conferred upon its author by Fuller ; also for
an anecdote which relates that during one of its per-
formances a gentlewoman went mad on hearing the
words sequar, seguar, uttered in a tone of tragic horror.
The following titles, chosen pretty much at random
— ' Adrastus Parentans,' ' Machiavellus,' ' Lselia,'
* Leander,' ' Fatum Vortigerni,' * -Emilia,' * Sapientia
Salomonis' — prove that the Latin playwrights went
far and wide afield for subjects. Should any student
have the patience to search our libraries for the MSS.
of these compositions, many of which are known to be
still extant, it is probable that he would find the influ-
ence of Seneca ascendant in them. What the scholars
of the sixteenth century seem to have understood by
classical dramatic theory, was a deduction from the
practice of the Roman rhetorician, with the further ap-
plication of imperfectly apprehended canons of unity
derived from Italian commentaries on Aristotle's
'Poetics.' Gian Giorgio Trissino has more than any
single man to answer for the growth of that quaint
formalism which imposed itself on the Italian theatre,
and found illustrious expression in the work of Racine
and his followers. A more intelligent and sympathetic
study of the Attic tragedians on the part of the Italian
humanists might have saved modern Europe from a
mass of errors which crept into that pedantic system.

226 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Unluckily, Seneca ranked first in the appreciation of
the critics, partly because he was easier to read, but
chiefly because he was easier to imitate. Even
Milton, both in his practice as the author of * Samson
Agonistes* and in his judgment of the Attic stage,
shows that he was infected with the same original
misapprehension of Greek art. The following verses
from * Paradise Regained,* sublime and beautiful as
they may be, betray a want of insight into the essence
of the drama as a fable put in action :

Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught,
In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with delight received.
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life.
High actions and high passions best describing.

The qualities on which Milton here insists gave weight
and dignity indeed to the Attic drama. They may be
even singled out for admiration also in the monologues
of Seneca. But the romantic, as opposed to the classi-
cal, school of dramatists, were right in their perception
that not ethical wisdom and not description, but action,
was the one thing needful to their art. They saw that
the Drama, as it differs from didactic poetry, must pre-
sent human life in all possible fullness, vigour, and
variety ; must portray and develop character ; must
delineate the conflict of personalities and passions, the
collision of human wills with circumstance ; must com-
bine events into a single movement with a climax and
catastrophe. Finally, they knew well that in a drama
the doing is the whole matter. Reflection upon action
is extraneous to the essence of a play. It forms, no

PSEUDO-CLASSIC IDEAL, 227

doubt, an ornament of meditated art. But the object of
tragedy is not to teach by precept. If he teaches, the
tragic playwright teaches by example. With this just
instinct the romantic poets applied all their energies to
action, allowing the conclusions, moral and sententious,
to be drawn by the spectators of that action. Work-
ing thus upon a sound method, in spite of formal dif-
ferences, due for the most part to the altered condi-
tions of the theatre itself in modern times, they shared
the spirit of the Greeks more fully than the pseudo-
classics. Of * brief sententious precepts,' capable of iso-
lation from the dramatic context, /Eschylus has hardly
any, Sophocles but few. Euripides, the least to be
commended of the Attic tragedians, abounds in them.
Seneca's plays are made up of such passages. It
might almost be laid down that in proportion as a
dramatist lends himself to the compilation of ethical
anthologies, in that very measure is he an inferior
master of his craft.

These remarks have led by a circuitous and dis-
cursive path to the two English tragedies which,
emanating from the school of Seneca in England, still
deserve particular attention. They are *Ferrex and
Porrex,' or, as the play is also called, * Gorboduc,* and
* The Misfortunes of Arthur.' Though intended to be
strictly classical, and written by Senecasters of the
purest water, both are founded upon ancient English
fables. This fact is not without significance. It
indicates that even in the limbo of pseudo-classic
imitation, the national spirit was alive and stirring.

K Q 2

228 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

The tragedies in question are therefore connected by
no unimportant link with the more vital art of the
romantic Drama.

* Gorboduc* has long been famous as the first tragedy
written in our tongue. Sir Philip Sidney in his * Defence
of Poesy ' hailed it as the dawn-star of a brighter day
for English literature. After blaming the playwrights
of his time as bastards of the Muses, * paper-blurrcrs/
churls * with servile wits, who think it enough if they
can be rewarded of the printer,' he passes a sweeping
censure on their dramatic compositions, charging them
with neglect of rule and precedent, and showing how
they violate the laws of * honest civiUty and skilful
poetry.* The one exception he makes, is in favour of

* Gorboduc* ' It is full,' he says, * of stately speeches
and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of
Seneca his style.' The only grave blot he detects in
it, is non-observance of the unity of time. In this
criticism, delivered by so excellent a wit as Sidney, by
Sidney whom the ballad of * Chevy Chase ' stirred like
the sound of the trumpet, we learn how the best
intellects lay under bondage to that false ideal which I
have attempted to describe. What Sidney demands
of the tragic drama, is solemn diction, sonorous de-
clamation, conformity to the unities. He knows of no
model superior to Seneca. Judged by these standards,

* Gorboduc ' is almost perfect Unruffled calm, senten-
tious maxims, lengthy speeches, ceremonious style, the
action dealt with by narration : all these qualities it
possesses in as full a measure as a play by Trissino
himself. Alas, adds Sidney, that the unity of time
was not observed ! Only that was lacking to a work
of absolute art in English.

NORTOX AND SACKVILLE, 229

* Gorboduc ' was written by Thomas Norton and
Thomas Sackville. Norton was a strict reformer of
the bitterest sect, a polemical pamphleteer, and per-
secutor of the Roman Catholics. Though a barrister
by profession, his inclination led him to theology.
He translated Calvin's * Institutions of the Christian
Religion,' and versified the Psalms in wretched
doggrel. Sackville's career belongs to English
history. Son of Elizabeth's kinsman, Sir Richard
Sackville, the Privy Councillor and Chancellor of the
Court of Augmentations, he grew up in close intimacy
with the Queen. As his will informs us, he was *in
his younger years, by her particular choice and liking,
selected to a continual private attendance upon her
own person.* His youth was wild and extravagant ;
and at one period, between the years 1563 and 1566,
he lost the favour of his royal cousin. Elizabeth
declared that ' she would not know him till he knew
himself.' Sackville returned to a knowledge of him-
self in time, however, to secure a brilliant future. On
his fathers death in 1566, he entered into the enjoy-
ment of a vast estate. He was created Knight of the
Garter, Privy Councillor, Baron Buckhurst, Earl of
Dorset, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, and
Lord High Treasurer of England.

In his early manhood, and while his extravagance
was moving Elizabeth's indignation, Sackville played
no mean part in English literature. To him we owe
the finest portions of * The Mirror for Magistrates,' that
great collection of poems which has been justly said
to connect the work of Lydgate with the work of
Spenser. Sackville's part in it has certainly more of

230 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Spenser's than of Lydgate*s spirit ; and the Induc-
tion, though sombre enough to justify Campbell in
calling it * a landscape on which the sun never shines/
forms a worthy exordium to the graver poetry of the
Elizabethan age. With the publication of that work
in 1565, his literary activity ceased. ' Gorboduc' had
already been played in 1561, when Sackville was but
twenty-five years of age, and had not yet deserved the
Queen's displeasure. Norton, his collaborator in the
tragedy, was four years his senior. Upon the title-page
of the first and pirated edition (1565), the first three acts
are ascribed to Norton, the fourth and fifth to Sackville.
Nor does there seem to be sufficient reason for dis-
puting this assignment, which was not contradicted
by the authors when the play was reprinted (with
their sanction apparently) under the title of * Ferrex
and Porrex* in 1570. It is difficult to trace any im-
portant difference of style, although the only pathetic
passage in the drama, and some descriptions not
wholly unworthy of Sackville's contribution to * The
Mirror for Magistrates,' occur in the fourth act.

Framed upon the model of Seneca, ' Gorboduc '
is made up of dissertations, reflective diatribes, and
lengthy choruses. The action, of which there is
plenty behind the scenes, is reported by Messengers.
The dialogue does not spring spontaneously from the
occasion ; nor is it used to bring the characters into
relief by natural collision. Each personage delivers
a set oration, framed to suit his part, and then gives
way to the next comer. The second scene of the first
act might be used to illustrate this method. Gorbo-
duc, having decided to divide the realm of Britain

PLOT OF * GORBODUC: 231

between his two sons Ferrex and Porrex, seeks the
advice of his Privy Council. First of all, the King sets
forth at great length his reasons for desiring a change.
Then each of the three Councillors unfolds a different
theory of government in measured terms. Gorboduc
thanks them, replies that he adheres to his opinion, and
dismisses the assembly. There is no argument, no per-
suasion, no contention, no pleading, in this cold de-
bate. Our mind reverts to Marlowe's disputes between
Edward II. and his barons, not to speak of Shakspere's
scenes of a like order.

The plot of * Gorboduc ' is well explained in the
Argument prefixed to the first edition. ' Gorboduc,
King of Britain, divided his realm in his lifetime to his
sons, Ferrex and Porrex. The sons fell to division
and dissension. The younger killed the elder. The
mother, that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge
killed the younger. The people, moved with the
cruelty of the fact, rose in rebellion and slew both
father and mother. The nobility assembled and most
terribly destroyed the rebels. And afterwards, for want
of issue of the Prince, whereby the succession of the
crown became uncertain, they fell to civil war, in
which both they and many of their issues were slain,
and the land for a long time almost desolate and
miserably wasted.* This programme is fertile in
surprising incidents, rife with horrors, replete with all
the circumstances of a sanguinary history. Its defect
is superfluity of motives. The murder of the King
and Queen by their rebellious subjects should properly
have closed the play. By curtailing the conclusion,
Gorboduc would have taken his proper place as the

232 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

tragic protagonist, and would have closely resembled
a hero of the Attic stage who perishes through his own
error. The error of Gorboduc, what Aristotle styles
the d/Jiaprta of the hero, was his rash and inconsiderate
division of the realm for which he was responsible as
monarch. Though an error, it was not ignoble. It
had in it an element of greatness, blended with the
folly which brought forth bitter fruits. Those fruits
were discord between the Princes, the murder of the
elder by the younger, and the Queen's act of unnatural
vengeance on her fratricidal son. She in her death
was justly punished, while Gorboduc perished in the
general ruin he had brought by ill-considered gene-
rosity upon his kingdom. Up to this point, therefore,
the plot has tragic unity. The civil wars, which
followed on the King s death, may interest the philo-
sophical historian, but do not concern the dramatist

The authors of * Gorboduc * can hardly be censured
for drawing out the plot beyond its due dramatic limits,
for the very simple reason that they did not attempt to
treat it dramatically at all. Having caught this wild
beast of a subject, they tamed it down, and cut its
claws by a variety of shrewd devices. Though blood
flows in rivers, not a drop is spilt upon the stage. We
only hear of murders and wars in brief allusions,
formal announcements, and obscure hints dropped by
the Chorus. The division of the play into acts is
characteristically regular, and corresponds exactly to
the movement of the fable. In the first act Gorboduc
declares his intention of partitioning his kingdom, and
Videna, the Queen, expresses her disapprobation. In
the second act Ferrex and Porrex are incited by their

DUMB SHOWS AND CHORUS, 233

several confidants to make war, each upon the other. I n
the third act, while Gorboduc is asking the gods whether
they are not satisfied with Troy's destruction, a Messen-
ger informs him that Ferrex has died by his brother s
hand. In the fourth act Videna lashes herself up to
vengeance in a monologue of eighty-one lines, goes off
the stage, and after a short interval her murder of
Porrex is announced. In the fifth act a conversation
between privy councillors and noblemen informs us that
Gorboduc and Videna have been assassinated by their
subjects, that the rebels have been crushed, and that a
Civil War of Succession is in progress. The speeches
average some fifty lines.

Each act is concluded with a Chorus, spoken by
'four ancient and sage men of Britain,' into whose
mouths some of the best poetry of the play is put.
They comment on the situations, and draw forth the
moral, as thus :

Blood askcth blood, and death must death reciuitc ;
Jove by his just and everlasting doom
Justly hath ever so requited it.
This times before record, and times to come
Shall find it true; and so doth present proof
Present before our eyes for our behoof.

O happy wight that suffers not the snare
Of murderous mind to tangle him in blood !
And hapi)y he that can in time beware
By others' harms, and turn it to his good !
But woe to him that, fearing not to offend,
Doth serve his lust, and will not see the end !

In order to acquaint the audience beforehand with the
motive of each act, Dumb Shows were devised, which
digested the meaning of the play in five successive
scenes of metaphorical pantomime. The first act, for

234 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

instance, was ushered in by stringed music, * during
which came in upon the stage six wild men, clothed in
leaves/ One of these * bare on his back a faggot of
small sticks, which they all, both severally and together,
essayed with all their strengths to break, but it could
not be broken by them/ At last, one of the wild men
pulled out a stick, and broke it He was followed by
the rest, and the whole faggot fell to pieces. This
Dumb Show was meant to signify that * a State knit in
unity doth continue strong against all force, but being
divided is easily destroyed/ We are not surprised
to find that the Dumb Shows in * Gorboduc * required
a commentary. Standing by themselves, they were
little better than allegorical charades, and did not serve
to elucidate the action. The custom of prefacing the
acts of a play with Dumb Shows, which prevailed
widely in the first period of our Drama, had, however,
its excellent uses. These pageants were not always
allegorical. They frequently set forth the pith of the
action in a series of tableaux, appealing vividly to the
spectator's eyesight, and preparing him to follow the
dialogue with a clearer intelligence and a more com-
posed mind. They enriched the simple theatre of the
sixteenth century with exhibitions corresponding to
the Masques which then enjoyed great popularity in
England. In the case of serious plays like * Gorboduc,'
they relieved the dull solemnity of the performance,
and gave frivolous spectators something to look forward
to in the intervals of those dreary scenes.

'Gorboduc,' as we have seen, was written by a
learned lawyer and a lettered courtier. It was per-
formed at Whitehall before the Queen's Majesty by

SCHOLASTIC STYLE OF ' GORBODUC 235

Gendemen of the Inner Temple on January 17, 1561.
Authors and actors, alike, were men of birth and
culture, striving to please a royal mistress, famous for
her erudition. These circumstances account in no
small measure for the character of the tragedy. With
the example of Seneca and the Italians before their
eyes, they did not aim at presenting a play as we now
understand that word. Marlowe and Shakspere had
not yet taught them what a play might be. They chose
a tragic story, rich in serious moral lessons. Omitting
the action, they uttered grave reflections on the benefits
of strong government, the horrors of division in a
realm, and the disorders introduced by violence of pas-
sion into human life. The fable, with its terrible epi-
sodes, catastrophes, and scenes of bloodshed, lurked
like a lurid background in the imagination of the
spectators. Those grave debating personages on the
stage supplied their minds with food for thought and
meditation. That very little scope was left for his-
trionic action, mattered not. We may even doubt
whether the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple could
have done justice to Cordelia or King Lear, suppos-
ing that Norton and Sackville had been able to treat
their similar subject with a Shakspere's genius for the
drama.

What gives its chief interest to * Gorboduc,* has
not yet been mentioned. Not only is this the first
regular tragedy in English. It is also the first play
written in Blank Verse. Surrey adapted the metre
from the Versi Sciolti of the Italians, and used it in his
translation of the second and fourth Books of the
' i^neid/ Norton and Sackville brought it into dra-

236 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

matic literature — tame as yet in cadence and mono-
tonous in structure ; but with so fateful and august a
future, that this humble cradle of its birth commands
our reverence. The peroration to Videna s invective
against her son Porrex will show how Sackville used
blank verse :

Murderer, I thee renounce ! Thou art not mine.
Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee,
Nor never bode I painful throes for thee !
Changehng to me thou art, and not my child,
Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew :
Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature's work.
Thou never sucked the milk of woman's breast.
But from thy birth the cruel tiger's teats
Have nursM thee ; nor yet of flesh and blood
Formed is thy heart, but of hard iron wTought ;
And wld and desert woods bred thee to life !

Surrey, in his version of Dido's address to -^neas,
had already written :

Faithless, forsworn ! no goddess was thy dam !
Nor Dardanus beginner of thy race !
But of hard rocks Mount Caucase monstruous
Bred thee, and teats of tigers gave thee suck.

Marcella's apostrophe to Videna, upbraiding her for the
murder of Porrex, combines declamation and descrip-
tion in verses which are not deficient in dramatic
vigour :

O queen of adamant, O marble breast !

If not the favour of his comely face.

If not his princely cheer and countenance,

His valiant active arms, his manly breast,

If not his fair and seemly personage.

His noble limbs in such proportion cast

As would have rapt a silly woman's thought —

If this mote not have moved thy bloody heart,

BIRTH OF BLANK VERSE. 237

And that most cruel hand the wretched weapon

Even to let fall, and kissed him in the face,

With tears for ruth to reave such one by death,

Should nature yet consent to slay her son ?

O mother, thou to murder thus thy child !

Even Jove with justice must with lightning flames

From heaven send down some strange revenge on thee I

Then her memory reverts to the young bravery of
Porrex in the tilting-yard and battle :

Ah, noble prince, how oft have I beheld
Thee mounted on thy fierce and trampling steed,
Shining in armour bright before the tilt,
And with thy mistress' gleeve tied on thy helm,
And charge thy staff, to please thy lady's eye.
That bowed the headpiece of thy friendly foe !
How oft in arms on horse to bend the mace.
How oft in arms on foot to break the sword ;
Which never now these eyes may see again !

VI.

The * Misfortunes of Arthur,' like 'Gorboduc,' was
written by learned men, and acted by the members of a
legal society before the Queen. The Gentlemen of
Gray's Inn produced it at Greenwich on the 8th of
February, 1587. The author of the tragedy was
Thomas Hughes. The choruses, dumb shows, argu-
ment, induction, and some extra speeches — all the
setting of the play in short — are ascribed to other stu-
dents of the Inn. Among these occurs the name of
Francis Bacon. The future Lord Verulam was at that
time in his twenty-third year. The subject of the
* Misfortunes of Arthur' was well chosen. The Arthurian
legend, here presented to us, is a truly Thyestean
history of a royal house devoted for its crimes of inso-

238 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

lence to ruin. Uther Pendragon loved Igerna, the wife
of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, whom he afterwards slew
in battle. The fruits of their adultery were a son and
daughter, twins of the same birth, Arthur and Anne.
Arthur, when he grew to man's estate, became the
father of Mordred by his sister Anne. In course of time
he married Guenevora ; and in his absence, on a success-
ful campaign against the Emperor Lucius Tiberius, left
his queen with Mordred. Mordred and Guenevora filled
up the cup of incest and adultery. On Arthur's return,
Guenevora betook her to a nunnery, and Mordred
stirred war against his father. They met in battle.
Mordred slew himself on Arthur s sword ; but, dying,
struck his father with a mortal wound. Thus ended the
House of Pendragon.

This legend, hideous in its details, arid far more re-
pugnant to our taste than the common tale of Lancelot s
love, supplied the author with a fable suited to his style
of art He had set himself to imitate Seneca's method
of dealing with a tale of antique destiny ; and no tragedy
of Thebes or Pelops* line was ever more tremendous.
At the same time he treated his main motive as a Greek,
rather than the Roman rhetorician, might have used it.
I hazard this criticism although Hughes has not per-
meated the whole play with that prevailing sense of the
divine wrath, of At6 following her victim from above,
and Atasthalia confusing his reason from within, which
would have made it i?£schylean. In his hands the plot
is conducted on the lines of a chronicle play. This, in
itself, marks an important divergence from Seneca's
habit of treatment, and suggests comparison with the
Euripidean drama. Yet, on the whole, we must classify

'MISFORTUNES OF ARTHUR: 239

the play with * Gorboduc * as an experiment in Roman
tragedy.

In the first act, Guenevora resolves to take refuge
in the nunnery. The rest of the tragedy relates the
conflict between son and sire. First they debate, each
with the accustomed confidant, about engaging in this
war. Arthur is restrained by motions of relenting
toward his son. Mordred dreads his father s veterans.
At length the combat opens. The King, on whose side
our sympathies are powerfully enlisted, drives his foes
before him, when Mordred rushes in, and by his des-
perate suicide effects the purpose of his hate. The
decisive incident is of course narrated by a Messenger.
But Arthur survives the battle, and lives to comment
in the fifth act on his nation's overthrow. He quits the
stage with this apostrophe to fate and fortune :

This only now I crave, O fortune, erst
My faithful friend ! Let it be soon forgot,
Nor long in mind nor mouth, where Arthur fell.
Yea, though I conqueror die, and full of fame.
Yet let my death and 'parturc rest obscure !
No grave I need, O fates ! nor burial rites.
Nor stately hearse, nor tomb with haughty top ;
But let my carcase lurk ; yea, let my death
Be aye unknown, so that in every coast
I still be feared and looked for every hour.

In order to have invested the plot with true artistic
unity, Guenevora should have stayed, like Clytemnestra,
to meet the King, or have confronted him in the last act.
But this was not demanded by the scheme of Seneca ;
and a kind of external unity, more suited to his style
of art, is gained by the introduction of the Ghost of
wronged and murdered Gorlois. He opens the first

240 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

act, crying for revenge ; and closes the fifth with a pro-
phecy of Queen Elizabeth. It was Uther's crime of
v)8/ots against Gorlois which set in motion the whole
series of events so fatal to his house. Therefore the
Ghost of Gorlois, like the Ghosts of Tantalus in Seneca's

* Thyestes' and of Thyestes in his 'Agamemnon/ broods
above the action, and retires at last blood-surfeited, ap-
peased. It may also be remarked that the bringing of
Arthur back to fight his son and die in Cornwall, the first
seat of crime, was a touch worthy of the Greek sense
of fate.

The Ghost, imported from Seneca into English
tragedy, had a long and brilliant career. Lord Brook,
in his ' Alaham,* summons * the Ghost of one of the old
Kings of Ormus ' from the limbo of undated age to
speak his prologue. In Jonson's 'Catiline* the Ghost of
Sylla stalks abroad, * ranging for revenge.' Marston's
Andrugio, Tourneur*s Montferrers, Kyd's Andrea — to
mention at haphazard but a few of these infernal visi-
tants— fill the scene with hollow clamours for revenge.
Shakspere, who omitted nothing in the tragic apparatus
of his predecessors, but with inbreathed sense and swift
imagination woke those dead things to organic life,
employed the Ghost, all know with what effect, in

* Hamlet' and ' Macbeth ' and * Julius Caesar.' It is not
here the place to comment upon Shakspere's alchemy
— the touch of nature by which he turned the coldest
mechanisms of the stage to spiritual use. Enough to
notice that, in his hands, the Ghost was no longer a
phantom roaming in the cold, evoked from Erebus to
hover round the actors in a tragedy, but a spirit of like
intellectual substance with those actors, a parcel of the

ADVAXCE IX TRAGIC STYLE, 241

universe in which all live and move and have their
being.

'The Misfortunes of Arthur' shows a marked ^
advance on * Gorboduc/ The characters are far more
fully modelled — those of Arthur and Mordred standing
forth in bold relief. The language is less studiedly
sententious. The verse flows more harmoniously.
The descriptive passages are marked by greater vivid-
ness ; and the dialogue evolves itself more sponta-
neously from the situation. Many vigorous single
lines anticipate the style of Marston ; who, without
Shakspere's work before his eyes, could certainly have
not produced a better tragedy. Some of these lines
are due to Seneca :

Yea, worse than war itself is fear of war . . .
Small griefs can speak, the great astonished stand.

Seneca had written :

Pejor est bello timor ipse belli. . . .
Cune leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.

Shakspere wrote :

The grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

To neglect this instance of the Shaksperian alchemy,
though unseasonable, was beyond my fortitude.

What the Greeks called Stichomuthia is com-
mon in this tragedy. Gawin, for example, urges on
Mordred the imprudence of resisting Arthur in the
field.

G. And fear you not so strange and uncouth war ?
Al. No, wore they wars that grew from out the ground !
G. Nor yet your sire so huge, yourself so small ?
M. The smallest axe may fell the hugest oak.

242 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

G, Nor that in felling him yourself may fall ?

M, He falleth well that falling fells his foe.

G> Nor common chance, whereto each man is thrall ?

M, Small manhood were to turn my back to chance.

This dialogue by a stroke of tragic irony prefigures
the catastrophe, which is thus described by the
Messenger ;

So saying, forth he flings,
And desperate runs on point of Arthur's sword —
A sword, alas ! prepared for no such use !
VVhereon engored, he glides till, near approached.
With dying hand he hews his father's head.
So through his own annoy he 'noys his liege.
And gains by death access to daunt his sire.

From the point of view of tragic passion, the
finest scene in the play, and the highest in expres-
sion, is when Arthur greets the dead body of his
son.

[The breathless body of Mordred in armour^ as hefell^
is brought upon the stage,

A, A causeless foe ! When wars did call me hence.
He was in years but young, in wit too old.
As virtue shineth most in comeHest wights,
When inward gifts are decked with outward grace.
So did his wit and feature feed that hope.
Which falsely trained me to this woeful hap.

[He turns to the corpse.

His mind transformed thus, I cannot choose

But long to see what change his face sustains.

My blood and kindred, doubled in his birth,

Inspires a mixed and twice-descending love,

Which drives my dying veins to wish his view.

Unhelm his luckless head, set bare his face.

That face which erst pleased me and mine too much !

Ch, See, worthiest king, the hope of all your realm,
Had not his lust to rule prevented all.

A, I see, alas ! I see — Hide, hide again !
Oh, spare mine eyes !— a witness of my crimes,

ARTHUR AND MORDRED. 243

A fearful vision of my former guilt,
A dreadful horror of a future doom,
A present gall of mind ! O happy they,
Whose spotless lives attain a dreadless death !
And thou, O hapless boy ! O spite of fates !
What might I term thee— nephew, son, or both ?
Alas ! how happy should we both have been.
If no ambitious thought had vexed thy head.
Nor thou thus strived to reave thy father*s rule,
But stayed thy time, and not forestalled us both !

Cador, an attendant noble, compares Mordred in
his fate to the 'hot-spurred' and aspiring Phaethon.
Arthur resumes his lamentation :

What ruth, ah, rent the woeful father*s heart,
That saw himself thus made a sonless sire !
Well, since both heavens and hell conspired in one
To make our ends a mirror to the world,
Both of incestuous life and wicked birth,
Would God the fates that linked our faults alike
Had also framed our minds of friendlier mould.
That as our lineage had api)roached too near.
So our affections had not swerved so far !

Something magnanimous in Arthur's attitude toward
his dead son, something noble in his meditation on their
common crime, the playing with antitheses, the covert
allusion to Guenevora's guilty love, the natural and
dignified movement of the dying hero's apostrophes
to fate — all these points of style seem to me to
indicate a study of the Greek at first hand. The
' Misfortunes of Arthur,' superior in all respects to
' Gorboduc,' has this particular superiority, that it
breathes in parts the air of an Euripidean tragedy.

2U SHAICSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

VII.

The tragedies of what I have called the pseudo-
classic school differ in very essential points from the
type of the true English drama. Their authors, men
of birth, culture, and position, were unable to stem the
tide of popular inclination. They could not persuade
play-goers to prefer the measured rhetoric of Seneca
to the stirring melodrama and varied scenes of the
romantic poets. It remains, however, to be asked what
these workers in an unsuccessful style, permanently
achieved for our dramatic literature. The answer is
not far to seek. Their efforts, arguing a purer taste
and a loftier ideal than that of the uncultivated English,
forced principles of careful composition, gravity of
diction, and harmonious construction, on the attention
of contemporary playwrights. They compelled men
of Marlowe's mental calibre to consider whether mature
reflection might not be presented in the form of drama-
tic action. The earlier romantic playwrights regarded
the dramatisation of a tale as all-important. The
classical playwrights contended for grave sentences
and weighty matter. To the triumph of the romantic
style the classics added this element of studied thought.
Mere copies of Latin tragedy were doomed to deserved
unpopularity with the vulgar. Yet these plays had
received the approbation of the Court and critics : and
the approbation of the higher social circles is rarely
without influence. Thus, though themselves of little
literary value and of no permanent importance, they
^ taught certain lessons of regularity and sobriety in

VALUE OF THE PSEUDO-CLASSICS, 245

tragic art, by which the poets of the romantic drama
did not fail to profit We have cause to be thankful
that no Richelieu, with a learned Academy at his back,
was at hand in England to stereotype this pseudo-classic
style ; and that the Queen who patronised our theatre
in its beginnings, was very far from being a purist in
dramatic matters. Else Marlowe, like Corneille, might
have been forced to walk in the fetters which Sidney
and Sackville sought to forge, and the Shaksperian
drama might never have been England's proudest boast
in literature. But, while recording our gratitude for
these mercies, we should not refuse their due meed to
the School of Seneca. It is no slight thing moreover to
have given blank verse to the English stage ; and drama-
tic blank verse was certainly the discovery of Norton,
Sackville, Hughes, and Gascoigne. These followers
of Seneca and the Italians familiarised the reading
public with this metre in their * Gorboduc ' (1561),
* Jocasta' (1566), and ' Misfortunes of Arthur' (1587).
The first of these works was printed at least twenty
years before the production of Marlowe's * Tamburlaine.'
The last of them was printed three years before
Marlowe sent that play to press.

246 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

CHAPTER VII.

TRIUMPH OF THE ROMANTIC DRAMA.

I. Fifty-two Plays at Court— Analysis of their Subjects — The Court
follows the Taste of the People — The * Damon and Pithias * of Ed-
wards— * Romeo and Juliet * — * Tancred ' and * Gismunda ' — * Promos
and Cassandra.' — II. Contemporary Criticisms of the Romantic Style
— Gosson — ^Whetstone — Sidney. — III. Description of the English
Popular Play — The Florentine Farsa — Destinies of this Form in
England.

Though the pseudo-classical or Italian type of Tragedy
engaged the attention of learned writers, it must not
therefore be imagined that the Court was exclusively
addicted to this kind of entertainment. From Minutes
of the Revels between 1568 and 1580, Mr. Collier has
published a list of fifty-two plays ; eighteen of which
bear antique titles, while twenty-one appear to have
been Dramatised Romances, six Moral Plays, and seven
Comedies. None of these survive. Composed by
unknown playwrights only to be acted, they perished
in thumbed MSS. together with the other properties
of their itinerant possessors, before arriving at the
honours of the press. Only Gentlemen of Grays Inn
or the Middle Temple, amateur authors and dilettante
actors could afiford the luxury of printing their per-
formances. Only tragedies put on the stage with the
^clat of ' Gorboduc,' tempted publishers to acts of
piracy.

•
ROMANTIC PIJiYS, 247

That the fifty-two plays, cited by Collier as having
been exhibited at Court during those twelve years,
failed to struggle into print, proves that the life of the
popular drama was exuberantly vigorous. Men of birth
and erudition might translate or copy Seneca, with the
view of elevating English taste ; and such men had a
direct reason for publishing their works. But those
numerous professional artists who now catered for the
public — strolling players, setting up their booths in the
yards of hostelries or knocking at great men's gates in
seasons of festivity — actors with temporary licence from
the local magistrates — superior companies with licence
from the Queen — Lord Leicester's Servants, Lord
Derby's Servants, the Lord Chamberlain's Servants,
Lord North's Servants — these men plied their trade
with no further object in view than full houses, fair
receipts, and the approbation of mixed audiences. Per-
manent theatres were already established in more than
one quarter of the suburbs ; and the people had be-
come the patrons of the stage. It was not to the
interest of such professional players to produce their
repertories in a printed form. A popular piece was valu-
able property, and was jealously guarded by the company
which owned it. Moreover, it is highly probable that
the rudimentary dramas of this epoch existed in single
copies, from which the leading actor taught his troop,
or that they were * Plat-form ' sketches filled in by
extemporisation.

Though the titles of these fifty-two plays are both
curious and instructive, it would serve no useful pur-
pose to attempt to classify them. ' Orestes * and the
'History of Cynocephali ; ' * Duke of Milan' and

248 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

* Murderous Michael ; ' * Six Fools ' and * The History
of Error : ' we seem in these names to detect the
classic and romantic fable, the Italian story and the
domestic tragedy, the farce and the morality. But
one thing may be safely assumed of the whole list ;
viz. that whatever was their subject-matter, they were
each and all designed for popular amusement. In other
words, we can feel tolerably certain that these plays,
produced at Court, formed together a mixed species,
observant of no literary rules, depending for effect
upon the scope afforded to the actor, and for success
upon appeal to the taste of uninstructed London play-
goers. Such as they were, they contained in embryo
the English or Romantic Drama, the Drama which
Marlowe was to mould and Shakspere was to perfect

There is plenty of proof that at this period, a period
decisive for the fufure of the English theatre, the
Court rather followed than directed the taste of the
people. It was the business of the Master of the
Revels, upon the occasion of Christmas or some other
feast-time, to convene the players and invite them to
rehearse the pieces they were ready to perform. The
companies produced the budget of such plays as they
were in the habit of exhibiting before the public or at
great men's houses ; and from these the Master of the
Revels chose what he thought suitable. The Queen
herself had no fastidious appetite. All she seems to
have cared for in the matter of stage-spectacles, was
that the supply should be both plentiful and various.
Thus, instead of hampering the evolution of the national
drama in its earlier stages, the Court gave it protection
and encouragement. Performances at Court confirmed

THE PUBLIC AXD THE COURT 249

and ratified the popularity which any piece had gained
by open competition.

The Romantic species, with all its absurdities and
extravagances, with its careless ignorance of rules and
single-minded striving after natural effect, took root and
acquired form before critics and scholars turned their
attention seriously to the stage. A school of play-
wrights and of actors, dependent upon popular support,
came into being. London audiences were already
accustomed to the type of play which thus undisputedly
assumed possession of the theatre. It was too late now
for critics or for scholars to resist that growth of wild-
ing art ; for the genius of the people had adopted it,
and the Queen did not disdain it. Great poets were
soon to see the opportunity it offered them ; and great
actors bent their talents to the special style of histrionic
art which it demanded. In spite of pedantic opposition,
in spite of Sidney's noble scorn, the world was destined
to rejoice in Shakspere.

Even playwrights of superior station and culture,
poets aspiring to the honours of the press, were
irresistibly attracted by the vogue of the Romantic
Drama. Thus Richard Edwards, whose work is men-
tioned with applause by Puttenham, selected a subject
from Valerius Maximus, and composed a tragi-comedy
upon the tale of * Damon and Pithias ' (1565 i*).^ Yet,
though he laid the scene at Syracuse, he brought Grim,
the Collier of Croydon, to the court of Dionysius,
mixing kings and clowns, philosophers and classic

* This play was entered on the Stationers' Books in 1 567. Collier
conjectures that it may have been the * tragedy ' by Edwards which was
played before the Queen two years earlier than this date.

25© SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

worthies, in admired confusion. The fashionable study
of Italian was not merely fruitful of translations in the
style of the ' Supposes' and ' Jocasta.' Popular tales
were dramatised in all their details. The Novella, with
its complicated episodes, was presented in a series of
loosely connected scenes. Our earliest ' Romeo and
Juliet' saw the light, as appears from Arthur Brooke's
preface to his poem on this story, before 1562.
Boccaccio's tale of ' Tancred and Gismunda ' was pro-
duced upon the stage in Robert Wilmot's version
in 1563. George Whetstone made one of Cinthio's
Hecatommithi the subject of his * Promos and
Cassandra,' printed in two parts in 1578. Cinthio
had already dramatised this story in the ' Epitia ; '
and Shakspere conferred immortality upon its fable
by using it for ' Measure for Measure.'

II.

From plays which found their way into the printer s
hands, we cannot rightly judge the products of this
fertile epoch. They are far too few in number, and
with some rare exceptions are the compositions of men
distinguished by birth and literary culture. In order
to form a more exact conception of the romantic
drama in its period of incubation, when professional
actors and playwrights — the two arts being commonly
exercised by the same persons — were unconsciously
shaping the new style, we have to view it in the mirror
of contemporary criticism. That criticism emanates
from writers hostile to the popular stage on several
accounts. Some, like John Northbrooke, assail it on

GOSSOiV'S CRITICISM. 251

the score of immorality. Others, like Sidney, attack
its want of art. It is chiefly with the latter class of
accusers that we are here concerned.

Stephen Gosson had been a writer, and probably
also an actor, of plays, before the year 1579, at which
date he published his ' School of Abuse.* This was
a comprehensive arraignment of the theatre from the
ethical point of view. His tract called forth numerous
replies, to one of which, composed by Thomas Lodge,
he retorted in a second pamphlet, entitled * Plays Con-
futed in Five Actions.* ^ This, though its object is also
mainly ethical, contains some references useful to our
present purpose. Regarding the variety of sources
drawn on by the playwrights at that early period, he
asserts : ' I may boldly say it because I have seen it,
that " The Palace of Pleasure.** ** The Golden Ass,** '' The
-/Ethiopian History,*' " Amadis of France,** **The Round
Table,** bawdy Comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish, have been ransacked to furnish the playhouses
in London.* That is to say, the translations of Italian
Novels published by Painter, the Chivalrous Romances
of the later Middle Ages, Heliodorus, the Myth of
' Cupid and Psyche,' together with comedies in Latin
and three modern languages, had already become the
stock in trade of dramatist and actor. On the topic of
History, he says : * If a true History be taken in hand,
it is made like our shadows, largest at the rising and
falling of the sun, shortest of all at high noon. For
the poets drive it most commonly unto such points as
may best show the majesty of their pen in tragical

* Reprinted in the Roxburgh Library, 1869, from the undated
edition of possibly 1581 or 1582.

252 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

speeches ; or set the hearers agog with discourses of
love ; or paint a few antics to fit their own humours
with scoffs and taunts ; or wring in a show to furnish
forth the stage when it is too bare ; when the matter
of itself comes short of this, they follow the practice of
the cobbler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it
out. So was the history of Caesar and Pompey, and
the play of the Fabii at the Theatre, both amplified
there where the drums might walk or the pen ruffle.'
Through this critique we discern how the romantic
method was applied to subjects of classical History. In
another place, he touches on the defects of chivalrous
fable as treated by romantic playwrights : * Sometimes
you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous
knight, passing from country to country for the love
of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster
made of brown paper, and at his return is so wonder-
fully changed that he cannot be known but by some
posy in his tablet, or by a broken ring or a handker-
chief, or a piece of cockle shell. What,' adds the
critic pertinently, * shall you learn by that } '

George Whetstone, when he published * Promos
and Cassandra' in 1578, prefixed to it a short dis-
course upon contemporary plays. It is a succinct
'disparagement of the romantic as compared with the
classical method. Having commended the moral
dignity and mature art of the ancient comic poets, he
proceeds thus : ^ * But the advised devices of ancient
poets, discredited with the trifles of young, unadvised,
and rash-witted writers, hath brought this commend-
able exercise in mislike. For at this day the Italian

* Six old plays, published by J. Nichols, 1779, p. 3.

irilETSTOXIiPS CRITICISM. 253

is SO lascivious in his comedies that honest hearers are

grieved at his actions : the Frenchman and Spaniard

follows the Italian's humour : the German is too holy,

for he presents on every common stage what preachers

should pronounce in pulpits. The Englishman, in this

quality, is most vain, indiscreet, and out of order.

He first grounds his work on impossibilities : then in

three hours runs he through the world ; marries,

gets children ; makes children men, men to conquer

kingdoms, murder monsters ; and bringeth gods from

heaven, and fetcheth devils from hell. And (that

which is worst) their ground is not so imperfect as

their working indiscreet ; not weighing, so the people

laugh, though they laugh them, for their follies, to

scorn. Many times, to make mirth, they make a

clown companion with a king ; in their grave counsels

they allow the advice of fools ; they use one order of

speech for all persons — a gross indecorum, for a crow

will ill counterfeit the nightingale s sweet voice ; even

so, affected speech doth ill become a clown. For to

work a comedy kindly, grave old men should instruct ;

young men should show the imperfections of youth ;

strumpets should be lascivious ; boys unhappy ; and

clowns should be disorderly : intermingling all these

actions in such sort as the grave matter may instruct,

and the pleasant delight : for without this change the

attention would be small, and the liking less.'

The whole case against the English Drama of that
age is summed up by Sir Philip Sidney in a famous
passage of his * Defence of Poesy.' Written probably
in 1583, though not printed till 1595, Sidney was most
likely acquainted with what Gosson and Whetstone

254 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

had already published on the subject. He certainly
knew Whetstone's Preface, for he borrowed some of
its phrases almost verbatim. Though long, I shall
not hesitate to transcribe the whole of Sidney's
criticism, bidding the reader bear in mind that the
apologist for poetry wrote some years before the
earliest of Shakspere's plays appeared, and when the
first of Marlowe's had not yet been acted. His
strictures apply therefore in the most literal sense to
the romantic drama in its embryonic period.

' Our tragedies and comedies, not without cause, are
cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civi-
lity nor skilful poetry. Excepting '' Gorboduc " (again I
say of those that I have seen), which notwithstanding, as
it is full of stately speeches, and well-sounding phrases,
climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full
of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully
teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy ; yet, in
truth, it is very defectuous in the circumstances, which
grieves me, because it might not remain as an exact
model of all tragedies. For it is faulty both in place
and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal
actions. For where the stage should alway represent
but one place ; and the uttermost time presupposed in
it, should be, both by Aristotle's precept, and common
reason, but one day ; there is both many days and
many places inartificially imagined.

' But if it be so in " Gorboduc," how much more
in all the rest ? where you shall have Asia of the one
side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under
kingdoms, that the player, when he comes in, must
ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will

SIDNEY'S CRITICISM. 255

not be conceived. Now shall you have three ladies
walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the
stage to be a garden. By-and-by, we hear news of
shipwreck in the same place, then we are to blame if
we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that
comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke, and
then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a
cave ; while, in the meantime, two armies fly in, re-
presented with four swords and bucklers, and then,
what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field ?
* Now of time they are much more liberal ; for
ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love ; after
many traverses she is got with child ; delivered of a
fair boy ; he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love,
and is ready to get another child ; and all this in two
hours' space ; which, how absurd it is in sense, even
sense may imagine ; and art hath taught and all
ancient examples justified, and at this day the ordinary
players in Italy will not err in. Yet will some bring in
an example of the Eunuch in Terence, that containeth
matter of two days, yet far short of twenty years.
True it is, and so was it to be played in two days, and
so fitted to the time it set forth. And though Plautus
have in one place done amiss, let us hit it with him,
and not miss with him. But they will say. How then
shall we set forth a story which contains both many
places and many times } And do they not know, that
a tragedy is tied to the laws of poesy, and not of
history ; not bound to follow the story, but having
liberty either to feign a quite new matter, or to frame
the history to the most tragical convenience } Again,
many things may be told, which cannot be shewed ; if

256 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

they know the difference betwixt reporting and repre-
senting. As for example, I may speak, though I am
here, of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the
description of Calicut ; but in action I cannot represent
it without Pacolet's horse. And so was the manner
the ancients took by some " Nuntius,"to recount things
done in former time, or other place.

' Lastly, if they will represent an history, they must
not, as Horace saith, begin **ab ovo," but they must
come to the principal point of that one action which
they will represent. By example this will be best
expressed ; I have a story of young Polydorus, de-
livered, for safety's sake, with great riches, by his
father Priamus to Polymnestor, King of Thrace, in
the Trojan war time. He, after some years, hearing
of the overthrow of Priamus, for to make the treasure
his own, murdereth the child ; the body of the child is
taken up ; Hecuba, she, the same day, findeth a sleight
to be revenged most cruelly of the tyrant. Where,
now, would one of our tragedy-writers begin, but with
the delivery of the child ? Then should he sail over
into Thrace, and so spend I know not how many years,
and travel numbers of places. But where doth Euri-
pides ? Even with the finding of the body ; leaving
the rest to be told by the spirit of Polydonis. This
needs no farther to be enlarged ; the dullest wit may
conceive it.

* But, besides these gross absurdities, how all their
plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies,
mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter
so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and
shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with

SUM TOTAL OF THESE CRITICISMS, 357

neither decency nor discretion ; so as neither the
admiration and commiseration, nor the right sport
fulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained. I
know Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing
recounted with space of time, not represented in one
moment : and I know the ancients have one or two
examples of tragi-comedies as Plautus hath Amphytrio.
But, if we mark them well, we shall find, that they
never, or very daintily, match hornpipes and funerals.
So falleth it out, that having indeed no right comedy
in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing
but scurrility, unworthy of our chaste ears ; or some
extreme show of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loud
laughter, and nothing else : where the whole tract of
a comedy should be full of delight ; as the tragedy
should be still maintained in a well-raised admiration.'
Thus critics like Sidney, trained in humanistic and
Italian studies, demanded a clear separation of tra-
gedy from comedy. No merriment, according to their
theory, may relax the frown of Melpomene. Thalia
may not borrow the chord of pathos from her sister s
lyre. It were well to banish clowns, buffoons, and
jugglers altogether from the stage. Kings and rustics
should not figure in the same play, unless the latter
be required to act the part of Nuntius. The three
main species of the Drama are properly assigned to the
three sections of society ; Tragedy to royal personages
and the aristocracy ; Comedy to the middle class ; the
Pastoral to hand-labourers. Action in tragedy should
be narrated rather than presented. The persons can
discuss events which have happened or are expected ;
but a Messenger must always be at hand to announce

258 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

important news. If needful, the clumsiest artifices
should be devised in order to prevent the audience
from actually beholding a battle or a murder. Lastly,
the unities of time and place are to be observed with
scrupulous exactitude, in spite of every inconvenience
to the author and of any damage to the subject.

These canons the Italians had already compiled
from passages of Aristotle and of Horace, without
verifying them by appeal to the Greek dramatic
authors. They were destined to determine the practice
of the great French writers of the seventeenth cen-
tury, and to be accepted as incontrovertible by every
European nation, until Victor Hugo with Hemani
raised the standard of belligerent Romanticism on the
stage of Paris.

III.

Not a single one of the above-mentioned rules was
obeyed in our Romantic Drama. In a dialogue
between G., H., and T., quoted from Florio s * First
Fruits ' by Mr. Collier, one of the interlocutors says :

G. After dinner we will go see a play.

His friend answers :

H. The plays that they play in England are not right comedies.

A third joins in the conversation :

T. Yet they do nothing else but play every day !

The second sticks to his opinion :

H. Yea, but they are neither right comedies nor right tragedies.

The first inquires :

G* How would you name them then ?

ESSENCE OF ROMANTIC DRAMA, 259

The critic scornfully replies :

//. Representations of histories without any decorum.

Such in truth they were. Without the decorum
of deliberate obedience to classic rules, without the
decorum of accomplished art, without the decorum
of social distinctions properly observed, they drama-
tised a tale or history in scenes. Nothing in the
shape of a story came amiss to the romantic play-
wright ; and perhaps we cannot penetrate deeper into
the definition of the Romantic Drama than by say-
ing that its characteristic was to be a represented
story. In this it differed from the Classic or Athenian
Drama ; for there, although there lay a myth or fable
behind each tragedy, the play itself was written on
some point or climax in the fable.^

A Florentine, if at this epoch he had been asked,
* How do you name them then ?' might possibly have
answered, * Farsa ! ' For it is not a little curious that
in these very } ears, when the romantic type of art was
taking shape in England, a distinguished Florentine
playwright attempted to popularise a very similar
species in Tuscany. The endeavour was foredoomed
to failure. Italian dramatic literature had moved too
long already upon different lines ; and the life which
remained in it, was destined to survive in the fixed

^ I do not mean to assert that no plays of the Romantic species
are written, like the Classical, upon the point or climax of a story rather
than upon the story itself. What I do mean, is that the Romantic
method accepted the dramatic evolution of a story — setting forth, for
instance, the whole of a man's life, or the whole of a king's reign, or the
whole of a complicated fable. It is only necessary to mention AV/zf
Lear^ Pericles^ Henry /F., Cymbcline. And even where the plot is far
more strictly narrowed to a single point, as in Othello^ the dramatic
movement remains narrative.

s 2

26o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

personages and the improvisatory action of the Co7n-
media dell' Arte. Yet Giovanmaria Cecchis de-
scription of the Farsa in his prologue to * La
Romanesca* (a play of this species composed in 1585)
would serve better than the most elaborate description
to explain the nature of the English Romantic Drama
to men who never read a line of Marlowe. I have,
therefore, translated it from the Florentine reprint of
1880.

The Farce is a third species, newly framed

Twixt tragedy and comedy. She profits

By all the breadth and fullness of both forms,

Shuns all their limitations. She receives

Under her roof princes and mighty lords,

Which comedy doth not; is hospitable,

Like some caravanserai or lazar-house.

To whoso lists, the vulgar and the lewd.

Whereto Dame Tragedy hath never stooped.

She is not tied to subjects; for she takes

Or grave or gay, or pious or profane,

Polished or rude, mirthful or lamentable :

Of place she makes no question; sets the scene

In church, in public, nay, wherever she chooses :

Indifferent to time, if one day^s space

Content her not, she 11 run through two or three ;

What matters it ? Troth, she 's the pleasantest.

The readiest, best attired, fresh country lass,

The sweetest, comeliest, this world contains !

One might compare her to that jovial friar

WTio laughingly conceded to his abbot

All things he craved, always except obedience !

Enough for her to keep propriety

Of persons ; to be honest ; to observe

Moderate dimensions, decency of language,

Speaking the common speech of Christian folk.

Bom and brought up in this your native land.

She too, as I have told you, hails all fellows —

Sansculottes, big-wigs — men alike, as brothers.

And if the ancients used her not, brave playwrights

Among these modern, use her. If the Sire

CECCHI ON THE FARSA. 261

Of Those that Know wrote nothing in her favour,

Either she was not plying then, or haply

He broached that subject in his books now lost.

Besides, the Stagirite spoke nothing, mark you,

Of paper, printing, or the mariner's compass ;

Yet, prithee say, are these things not worth using

Because, forsooth, that great man did not know them ?

I^t then who lists make Farces at his will ;

And note that 't is far better thus to do.

Than to breed monsters, and to christen these

Tragedies, Comedies — lame things that need

Crutches or go-carts to get into motion !

Let Farces but be played two hundred years.

They 11 not be novelties to those, I warrant,

Who in far times to come will call us Ancients.

It would hardly be possible, I think, to plead the
cause of the Romantic Drama against the supposed
canons of Aristotle and the rules of Horace more
pleasantly than thus, or to set forth with more genial
intelligence the claims of the new style on popular ac-
ceptance. Curiously enough, the prediction uttered by
Cecchi in the last lines of his prologue has been amply
verified. We condemn the stilted tragedies of his con-
temporaries, and tax their comedies with imitative affec-
tation. We regard the Italian playwrights, with two
or perhaps three luminous exceptions, as obsolete anti-
quities ; while Shakspere's masterpieces in the mingled
or romantic manner are still new ; a perennial Fount of
Juvenescence for all dramatists who seek fresh inspira-
tion, and for all the audiences of Europe who desire a
draught of nature quickened with poetic passion.

The very faults of youthfulness which Sidney made
so manifest, were now to build the fortune of this
sweetest, prettiest country lass, for whom no name as
yet was found in England. Precisely because she, the un-

262 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

taught girl, the latest born of all the Muses, pronounced
herself no Muse of Tragedy or Comedy, because she
knew no rules distilled from foreign, obsolete, and
scholar-disciplined tradition, it was her mission to be-
come the Muse of Modem Drama. The Italian play-
wright called her Farsa. This title reminds us of
French Farce, with which she can indeed afford to re-
cognise some slight relationship. But she travelled so
far wider, climbed so far higher, penetrated so far
deeper, that to name her Farce at any time in Eng-
lish, would be out of question. The destinies of all
dramatic art were in her hands. She held the keys of
Tragedy and Comedy ; bid classic myth and legend suit
her turn ; stretched her rod over fairyland and history ;
led lyric poetry, like a tamed leopard- whelp, at chariot-
wheels of her fantastic progress. Critics now recognise
this village-maiden Muse, as Muse of the Romantic
Drama, Shakspere's Drama. Under those high-sound-
ing titles she now enjoys a fame equal to that of
her grave sisters, Attic Tragedy and Comedy. It
was her fortune to give to the modern world a theatre
commensurate with that of ancient Greece, adapted
to the spirit of the new-born age, differing indeed in
type from the antique, but not less perfect nor less
potent in its bearing on the minds of men.

What a future lay before this country lass — the
bride-elect of Shakspere's genius ! For her there was
preparing empire over the whole world of man : — over
the height and breadth and depth of heaven and
earth and hell ; over facts of nature and fables of
romance ; over histories of nations and of house-
holds; over heroes of past and present times, and

FUTURE OF ROMANTIC DRAMA, 263

airy beings of all poets' brains! Hers were Greene's
meadows, watered by an English stream. Hers, Hey-
wood's moss-grown manor-houses. Peek's goddess-
haunted lawns were hers, and hers the palace-bordered,
paved ways of Verona. Hers was the darkness of the
grave, the charnel-house of Webster. She walked
the air-built loggie of Lyly's dreams, and paced
the clouds of Jonson's Masques. She donned that
ponderous sock, and trod the measures of Volpone.
She mouthed the mighty line of Marlowe. Chapman's
massy periods and Marston s pointed sentences were
hers by heart. She went abroad through primrose
paths with Fletcher, and learned Shirley's lambent wit.
She wandered amid dark dry places .of the outcast
soul with Ford. ' Hamlet ' was hers. ' Anthony and
Cleopatra ' was hers. And hers too was ' The Tem-
pest.' Then, after many years, her children mated
with famed poets in far distant lands. ' Faust ' and
* Wallenstein,' * Lucrezia Borgia ' and ' Marion De-
lorme,' are hers.

For the present moment, when Marlowe is yet
at school at Canterbury, this young-eyed, nonchalant
girl, with the still unrecognised promise of such
womanhood, saunters afield with nameless playwrights
and forgotten singers. The strait-laced Melpomene,
who smiled so acidly on ' Gorboduc,' watches her
pastimes with a frown. But our Lady of Romance
heeds not Melpomene, and flouts the honours of that
pedant-rid Parnassus. She is abroad in dew-sprent
meadows to bring home the may. Nature, the divine
schoolmistress, instructs her in rules of living art
beneath the oaks of Arden, by the banks of Cam and

264 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Isis. Lap-full of flowers, ' warbling her native wood-
notes wild/ the country lass of English art returns
from those excursions to crowded booths at Bankside
or Blackfriars, to torch-lit chambers of Whitehall and
Greenwich. You may call her a grisette. But, once
again, what destinies are hovering over her !

265

CHAPTER VIII.

THEATRES, PLAYWRIGHTS, ACTORS, AND PLAYGOERS.

L Servants of the Nobility become Players — Statutes of Edward VL
and Mary — Statutes of Elizabeth — Licences. — IL Elizabeth's and
Leicester's Patronage of the Stage — Royal Patent of 1 574 — Master of
the Revels — Contest between the Corporation of London and the Privy
Council. — IIL The Prosecution of this Contest — Plays Forbidden
within the City — Establishment of Theatres in the Suburbs — Hostility
of the Clergy. — IV. Acting becomes a Profession — Theatres are Mul-
tiplied— Building of the Globe and Fortune — Internal Arrangements
of Playhouses — Interest of the Court in Encouragement of Acting
Companies. — V. Public and Private Theatres — Entrance Prices —
Habits of the Audience. — VI. Absence of Scenery — Simplicity of
Stage — Wardrobe — Library of Theatres. — ^VII, Prices given for Plays
— Henslowe — Benefit Nights — Collaboration and Manufacture of
Plays. — VIII. Boy- Actors — Northbrooke on Plays at School — The
Choristers of Chapel Royal, Windsor, Paul's — Popularity of the Boys
at Blackfriars— Female Parts — The Education of Actors. — IX. Pay-
ment to various Classes of Actors — Sharers — ^Apprentices — Receipts
from Court Performances — Service of Nobility — Strolling Companies
— Comparative Dishonour of the Profession. — X. Taverns — Bad Com-
pany at Theatres — Gosson and Stubbes upon the Manners of Play-
goers— Women of the Town — Cranle/s * Amanda.' — XL 'The Young
Gallant's Whirligig ' — ^Jonson's Fitzdottrel at the Play. — XI I. Com-
parison of the London and the Attic Theatres.

N.B. The authorities for this chapter are Collier's * History of English
Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare,' upon which it is chiefly
based ; the Tracts published by the Old Shakespeare Society, 1853 ;
and the Collection of Documents and Tracts in the Roxburghe Library,
1869.

The history of English dramatic literature cannot be
rightly understood without a survey of the theatres in
which plays were exhibited, of the actors who performed

266 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

them, and of the audience for which they were pro-
vided. In the infancy of the stage, there existed no
permanent buildings set apart for theatrical exhibi-
tions ; nor did play-acting constitute a recognised
profession. We have seen in the chapter upon Moral
Plays that noblemen used to maintain a musical
establishment for the service of their Chapels, and
to this department of their households the actors of
Interludes and Moral Plays were attached. When
not required by their masters, these players strolled
the country, calling themselves Servants of the mag-
nate whose pay they took and whose badge they
wore. After this fashion Companies of Actors came
into existence ; and the towns of England were in-
fested by wandering bands, professing to be the Ser-
vants of the Earl of Warwick, Lord Clinton, the Earl
of Derby, or some other eminent person, whose house-
hold supported the luxury of a trained set of players.
Often enough, the claim of such strollers was well
founded. But pretenders to a title which they could
not justify were numerous ; and under the name of
My Lord's Players, common vagabonds and men of
no condition roamed the counties. During the reign
of Edward VI. it was found necessary to place the
theatrical establishments of noble houses under the
special control of the Privy Council. Licences were
granted to the aristocracy to maintain troops of players,
and their performances were limited to the residences
of their masters. The political and religious disturb-
ances of that reign had given occasion to seditious
propaganda under the colourable pretext of play-
acting. There were no newspapers ; and next to the

STAGE IN REIGNS OF EDWARD AND MARY, 267

pulpit, the Stage, rude as it was, formed the most
popular and powerful engine for disseminating opinions
on matters of debate. During the reign of Mary,
theatrical exhibitions were submitted to even stricter
control. Finding that the Protestant reaction was
being worked by means of Moral Plays, the Crown
endeavoured to silence secular acting in public through
the length and breadth of England. Encouragement,
meanwhile, was given to the revival of Miracle Plays, in
the belief that these would educate the people back to
their old creeds. The Court, however, still maintained
a musical and dramatic establishment upon a scale of
great magnificence. In salaries alone, independent of
board, liveries, and incidental expenses, it is calculated
that Mary spent between two and three thousand
pounds a year on this department of her household.
It was impossible, however, by any repressive mea-
sures of the Privy Council, to check a custom which
had gained so strong a hold upon the manners of
the nation. Noblemen refused to be interfered with.
The public had no mind to be deprived of their
amusements. Therefore the class of men who gained
their livelihood by acting, having the goodwill of the
people and the protection of powerful masters on their
side, defied or eluded the orders of the Crown. It
would seem that Mary's edicts had the effect of in-
creasing clandestine performances, and driving the
professors of the art of acting into vagrancy and
vagabondage. This at least is the conclusion we may
draw from the tenor of Elizabeth's first proclamations
on the subject of the stage. These are clearly
regulative, implying the intention to check disorder

268 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

and to place a prevalent national amusement under
State supervision. Soon after Elizabeth s accession it
was decreed that no players should perform without
a licence from the Mayors of towns, or from the
Lord- Lieutenants of counties, or from two Justices of
the Peace resident in the neighbourhood. Companies
professing to be Servants of noblemen, who could not
prove their title, were to be treated as rogues and
vagrants under the rigorous Acts in force against such
persons. Plays on matters touching religion and
government were strictly forbidden. The department
of the Revels at Court was put at once upon a more
economical footing. But the theatrical establishments
of the aristocracy seem, at the same period, to have
been multiplied in numbers and considerably strength-
ened in efficiency.

It was a fortunate circumstance for the develop-
ment of our theatre that both Elizabeth herself and
her favourite Leicester were enthusiastically partial to
play-acting. Had it not been for their encouragement
and patronage, the stage could hardly have established
itself upon a permanent footing in London ; and the
conditions which rendered a national Drama possible
in England might have been missed. The justice of
this observation will be perceived when we come to
consider the next and most eventful chapter in the
history of the English stage. In the first years of
Elizabeth's reign, Leicester, then Sir Robert Dudley,
had the best company of players in his service. He
took a personal interest in their welfare, as appears

LEICESTER'S SERVANTS. 269

from a letter addressed by him in June 1559 to the
Earl of Shrewsbury. The object of this letter was to
obtain for them the licence to play in Yorkshire. He
begins by saying that his servants, * bringers hereof
unto you, be such as are players of interludes ; ' ex-
pressly states that they hold ' the licence of divers of
my Lords here, under their seals and hands, to play
in divers shires within the realm under their authori-
ties, as may amply appear unto your Lordship by the
same licence ; * and recommends them to Lord Shrews-
bury as * honest men, and such as shall play none other
matters, I trust, but tolerable and convenient.' Thus
it seems that, in conformity with Elizabeth's edicts,
the servants of Sir Robert Dudley had armed them-
selves with a licence signed by several Lord- Lieu-
tenants of counties, upon the production of which they
counted on the liberty to play within the jurisdictions of
the signataries.

The same players, relying on their Master's power-
ful support, advanced so far in their pretensions that
in 1574 they obtained from Elizabeth herself a Royal
Patent. This document, the first licence granted by
the Crown to a dramatic company, was given at Green-
wich under the Privy Seal upon May 7, to James
Burbage and four partners. Addressed * to all Justices,
Mayors, Sheriffs, Bailiffs, head Constables, under Con-
stables, and all other our officers and ministers,' it em-
powered Lord Leicester's servants to 'use, exercise,
and occupy the art and faculty of playing Comedies,
Tragedies, Interludes, Stage-plays, and such other
like ... as well for the recreation of our loving
subjects, as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall

270 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

think good to see them/ Elizabeth, in this paragraph,
specially contemplates the double function of Lord
Leicester's servants ; first as caterers for the public and
then as players at Court. Up to this time the royal
establishment had no formed body of dramatic artists,
and no players with the title of Queen's Servants.
The Master of the Revels for the time being engaged
the best companies to play at Court ; and among
these the Servants of Lord Leicester had been con-
spicuous for frequent performance. After tlie date of
the patent, Leicester's men, for a time at any rate,
called themselves, upon t!ie strength of the document,
' The Queen's Majesty's Poor Players.'

The patent next rehearses the places to which the
privilege extends : ' As well within our City of London
and Liberties of the same, as also within the liberties
and freedoms of any our Cities, Towns, Boroughs,
&c. whatsoever, as without the same, throughout our
Realm of England.' Then follow the limitations under
which the privilege is granted. All plays performed
by Leicester's men must have received the sanction of
the Master of the Revels. No public representations
might take place * in the time of Common Prayer, or
in the time of great and common Plague in our said
City of London.'

The privileges granted in this Royal Licence testi-
fied to Elizabeth's personal approval of Burbage and
his comrades, no less than to Leicester's warm-hearted
patronage. They were ample, and seemed explicit
enough to have conferred a monopoly of acting on this
company throughout the length and breadth of Eng-
land. Yet the players met with a determined opposi-

ELIZABETH'S LICENCE, 271

tion when they strove to exercise their rights, and only
entered, after a sharp struggle, into a partial enjoy-
ment of the Queen s concession.

Eleven years earlier. Archbishop Grindall had
already raised his voice against the growing fre-
quency of plays in London. He termed the actors
' an idle sort of people, which had been infamous in all
good commonwealths,' and called upon the Secretary
of State to get them altogether banished to at least
three miles beyond the City bounds. A disastrous
epidemic was then raging, which furnished the Arch-
bishop with an excellent argument. Undoubtedly the
concourse of all kinds of people to hear plays helped
to spread infection. Upon the double grounds which
Grindall had adopted in 1563, namely, the lewdness
and profanity of plays, and the peril of contagion in
times of sickness, the Corporation of London now
determined to resist the establishment of Leicester's
company within their jurisdiction.

On December 6, 1575, the Common Council drew
up a memorial upon the subject of play-acting, which
so curiously illustrates the feeling of the times, that it
must furnish copious extracts. The preamble opens
thus : ' Whereas heretofore sundry great disorders and
inconveniences have been found to ensue to this City
by the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of
people, specially youth, to plays, interludes, and shows ;
namely, occasion of frays and quarrels ; evil practices
of incontinence in great inns, having chambers and
secret places adjoining to their open stages and gal-
leries ; inveigling and alluring of maids, specially
orphans, and good citizens' children under age, to privy

272 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

and unmeet contracts ; the publishing of unchaste,
uncomely, and unshamefast speeches and doings ; with-
drawing of the Queen's Majesty's servants from Divine
service on Sundays and holy days, at which times such
plays were chiefly used ; unthrifty waste of the money
of the poor and fond persons ; sundry robberies by
picking and cutting of purses ; uttering of popular,
busy, and seditious matters, and many other corrup-
tions of youth, and other enormities ; besides that also
sundry slaughters and maimings of the Queen's sub-
jects have happened by ruins of scaffolds, frames, and
stages, and by engines, weapons, and powder used in
plays/ So far the Recorder has recited the first of
Grindall's arguments. He next takes up the second :
'And whereas in time of God's visitation by the
Plague, such assemblies of the people in throng and
press have been very dangerous for spreading of in-
fection, &c.' He then proceeds to remedies and regu-
lations, which are in substance these : i. That all
plays shall be subjected to censors appointed by the
Lord Mayor and Aldermen. 2. That none but players
licensed by the Council shall exhibit. 3. That the
same shall be taxed for maintenance of poor and sick
persons. 4. That no performance shall take place
during Divine service, or in times of general sickness.
5. That though the private houses of the nobility be
exempt from these restrictions, the Council shall de-
termine what constitutes a privileged residence, and
shall exercise control and censure over the plays
there represented.

Among the * Orders appointed to be executed in
the City of London ' during the year 1 5 76, one pro-

OPPOSITION FROM THE CITY. 273

vided for the total prohibition of theatrical perform-
ances in public within the City-bounds, upon the score
of their ungodliness. This Order of the Common
Council, had it taken full effect, would have nullified
the Queen s Licence. What gave further importance
to the matter was, that the Justices of Middlesex
made common cause with the Corporation ; and it
seemed not improbable that the players would be
driven far off into the country. Leicester's servants,
therefore, seeing their privileges threatened with ex-
tinction, sent up a petition (in which they styled
themselves ' the Queen's Majesty's Poor Players ') to
the Privy Council. This was answered, point by
point, in a Memorandum addressed by the Corpora-
tion to the same body. The actors argued that they
needed practice in public, in order that they might
acquire proficiency enough to play before the Queen
at Court. Their livelihood was being taken from
them. Their dramatic performances were honest re-
creations, fit for holydays. London was the proper
place for theatrical exhibitions, inasmuch as disorders
would certainly arise on winter evenings from persons
flocking to and from the stages in the fields. Though
it was right and proper to suspend play-acting in
times of the plague, it ought to be clearly defined
what rate of mortality constituted a general and dan-
gerous sickness. Lastly, they claimed the monopoly of
acting, which seemed to have been granted them.

To these pleas the Recorder responded. It is not
decent that the Queen should witness shows which had
been * commonly played in open stages before all the
basest assemblies in London and Middlesex ; ' there-

274 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

fore, if the players need practice, they must take it in
the private residences of their masters. The art of
acting is not a profession by itself, but is only tolerable
as a recreation exercised by men * using other honest
and lawful arts, or retained in honest services/ Holy-
days are abused by such folk, who do not respect the
regulation respecting service time ; and * it may be
noted how uncomely it is for youth to run straight
from prayer to plays, from Gods service to the
Devil's.' ^ If the fields are too far off to serve their
turn, * the remedy is ill conceived to bring them into
London ; ' it would be far better to put a stop to them
altogether. With regard to the Plague, it were desir-
able. Plague or no Plague, to be quit of plays ; yet,
if the point has to be considered, the right data for
deciding it are these : the common rate of mortality in
London is between forty and fifty per week, or more
often under forty ; if then the death-rate for two or
three weeks together has not exceeded fifty, it may be
assumed that there is no immediate peril on the score
of infection. Finally, if there must be players, a
monopoly extended to one company may be regarded
as a blessing. In that case let the Queen s Servants be
scheduled, man by man ; for as it is, the town is in-
fested with companies, all of which call themselves
Queen's Players.

From this contention between the Players and the
Corporation, it appears that the latter despaired of
suppressing the Drama altogether, though they would
have liked to do so. They scouted the notion that

• Mn the tract called The Second and Third Blast of Retreat from
Playsy the author says of Holidays : * Then all Hell breaks loose.'

DISPUTE BETWEEN COURT AND CITY, 275

Actors could be treated like the craftsmen of a recog-
nised trade. They had indeed to tolerate them in great
men's houses. But they were resolved to drive them
beyond the City bounds into the fields or country, to
silence them in Plague-time, and to restrain them from
performing on Sundays and holydays. It is also clear
that the strong point in the actor s case was the Queen's
partiality for the drama. This circumstance is con-
firmed by an order sent from the Privy Council,
December 24, 1578, to the Lord Mayor, commanding
him to suffer six companies — the Children of the Chapel
Royal and S. Paul's, and the Servants of the Lord
Chamberlain, Lord Warwick, Lord Leicester, and Lord
Essex — to play in London 'by reason that they are
appointed to play this Christmas before her Majesty.' ^

IIL

Open warfare on the subject of the Drama was thus
declared between the Court and the City. But it was
conducted upon terms of mutual respect and cautious
circumspection. Both parties took the tone of armed
neutrality rather than one of active hostility. The
Queen's patronage of Leicester's men, her known
partiality for stage-shows, and the privilege claimed by
the nobility, rendered it impossible for the Common
Council to prosecute their case with vigour. While

* The Second and Third Blast ^ printed in 1 580, * allowed by Authority,*
and adorned with the shield of the City, forms an important manifesto
against plays and theatres from the side of the Corporation. A long
section is directed against the privilege of Noblemen to maintain players,
and their abuse of this privilege by omitting to support them and turning
them over to the public as their source of income. See Roxburghe
Library Reprint, pp. 1 33 et seq,

276 SHAKSPERE^S PREDECESSORS.

protesting, they were forced to tolerate. The Court,
upon the other hand, was glad to temporise. It formed
no part of the Crown s policy to tamper with the ancient
freedom of the City ; and the attitude assumed by the
burghers of London showed that the matter in debate
was one of no slight moment to them. I nstead, there-
fore, of fighting out the battle, both sides consented to
a compromise. Instead of defining the situation by
fixed statute, it was left indefinite. The players took
the best line which was open to them. Relying on the
favour of the Court, bending to the authority of the
Corporation, they established themselves in permanent
buildings outside the strict limits of the City. This
was a conclusion of the struggle which the City can
hardly have foreseen. Hitherto plays had been acted
in the yards and galleries of inns on scaffolds erected
for the purpose. The Orders of the Common Council
had been directed chiefly against scandals thence en-
suing. Now they found themselves obliged to tolerate
a far more formidable nuisance. In Shoreditch, at
Blackfriars, on Bankside, in the best frequented and
most accessible suburbs, the players, whom the burghers
wished to extirpate, began to erect theatres. The
debatable lands which these persistent servants of the
public and the Court had chosen for their settlement,
illustrated in geographical terms the compromise upon
which their future existence depended. Those out-
lying districts were neither in the City nor the fields.
Comprehended for certain purposes within the juris-
diction of the Mayor, they still formed no parcel of his
undisputed, indefeasible domains. The suburbs sa-
voured of the country, to which the Corporation sought

THEATRES BUILT IN THE SUBURBS, 277

to relegate play-acting. Yet they lay convenient to the
public, and were handy to the gallants of the Court. It
was under the tacit, if unwilling, consent of the Mayor,
though not without explicit protest from distinguished
inhabitants of the invaded quarters, that the first self-
styled Theatres were built in 1576.

The decisive issue in this contest between the Court
and players on the one hand and the Corporation on the
other, resulting in the banishment of the players from
the City and their erection of permanent stages, is
commemorated in the following popular rhyme :

List unto my ditty !
Alas, the more the pity,
From Troynovant's old city
The Aldermen and Mayor
Have driven each poor player !

What the ballad leaves unnoticed, because it was not
then apparent, is that this expulsion of the players
from the City, Avith their ensuing settlement in the
suburbs, decided the fortunes of our Drama, and ad-
vanced it from the state of nomadism to that of urbane
and accredited civility.

The year 1576, following that in which the Corpo-
ration made its unsuccessful onslaught on play-acting,
may be regarded as the birth-year of the English
Drama. Three theatres, at least, were then established
in the purlieus of the City. The first of these was
styled * The Theatre ; ' the second took its name, in
all probability, from the plot of ground on which it
stood, and was called ' The Curtain.* ^ Both were in
Shoreditch, and both soon obtained a bad reputation

^ Curtina in base Latin means a little court.

278 SHAKSPERE*S PREDECESSORS,

for brawling, low company, and disreputable entertain-
ments. In the old play of Stukeley, the hero dis-
charges, among his other debts, upon his marriage
morning, five marks to the Bailiff of Finsbury —

For frays and bloodshed in the Theatre fields.

A ballad written in contempt of Marlowe records,
among the disorders of his manhood, that —

He had also a player been

Upon the Curtain stage.
But brake his leg in one lewd scene

AVhen in his early age.

The Servants of Lord Leicester in the same year built
their theatre at Blackfriars. On hearing that Burbage
had bought up certain dwellings for this purpose, near
the Lord Chamberlain's lodgings, the respectable in-
habitants of Blackfriars petitioned the Privy Council
against his project. They alleged that the concourse
of ' vagrant and lewd persons ' would prove a nuisance
to the neighbourhood, and in particular that the play-
house being close to the church, ' the noise of the drums
and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the
minister and the parishioners.' It is noticeable that
the Lord Chamberlain did not sign this petition. The
theatre was built, and continued to enjoy a high reputa-
tion under the name of * The Blackfriars.' Burbage's
company, which had first been Leicester's men, soon
after their settlement at Blackfriars, were known as
the Lord Chamberlain's Servants. Later on, in the
reign of James, they called themselves the King's
Servants. Their theatre, like those of Shoreditch, was
a wooden structure. After twenty years' use it became

CENSORSHIP OF VARIOUS KINDS. 279

untenantable, and in 1 596 it was rebuilt, Shakspere's
name occurring at that time among the company.^

A sermon, preached at Paul's Cross in December
[576 or 1577, shows that the erection of these theatres
had made a profound impression on the public mind.
' Look but upon the common plays in London,' exclaims
the preacher, * and see the multitude that flocketh to
them and followeth them ! Behold the sumptuous
Theatre houses, a continual monument of London's
prodigality and folly ! ' What, he argues, is the sense
of closing them in times of sickness ? ' The cause of
plagues is sin ; and the cause of sin are plays ; there-
fore the cause of plagues are plays/ A triumphant
syllogism, if the premisses be granted *

The voices of preachers and Puritan pamphleteers
were daily raised against playhouses. Yet the Court
would not abandon its amusements, and the public
grew daily more attached to the Drama. Elizabeth,
about this period, ratified her patronage of the Drama
by selecting twelve actors from the servants of her
nobles, and calling them the Queen's Players. In
1582 the contest between the Privy Council and the
Corporation was renewed, and the old arguments were
employed to silence the scruples of the citizens.
Playgoing is an * honest recreation,' and players must
have practice in order to ' attain to the more perfection
and dexterity ' when they appear at Court. At the
same time, the Lords of Council were desirous that
the Drama should be placed under proper restrictions.
Acting upon Sundays, in Lent, or during service time
on holy days, was strictly forbidden — a prohibition

^ Query : Was Blackfriars rebuilt or built for the first time in 1 596 ?

28o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

constantly evaded in fact Stage-plays were kept
under the censorship of the Master of the Revels ;
and when Martin Marprelate was brought upon the
stage in 1589, commissioners were appointed to assist
that functionary of the Court in his labours. At this
period, all acting was suspended for a season.

To the continued jealousy of the civic authorities,
combined with the censorship established by the Court,
we may ascribe the comparative purity of moral tone
and the total absence of political or religious satire,
which distinguish our early Drama. When we contrast
English Interludes with French Farces, and English
with Italian Comedies, we cannot fail to be struck with
the greater manliness and innocence that mark the
comic stage of London. The whole mass of our
dramatic literature reveals nothing like the ' Farce de
Fr^re Guillebert ' or the * Mandragola ' of Machiavelli.
Perhaps, without indulging too much in national vanity,
we may attribute something also to the healthy spirit
of the English people. The public, who were the real
patrons of the Drama, kept the playwrights within
decent limits ; for the public, though it did not
share the Puritan horror of dramatic exhibitions, re-
mained in sympathy with law-abiding and God-fearing
teachers. At the same time, English people, before
the triumph of Puritan opinions, saw no reason why
theatres should not stand side by side with churches,
and both be used for purposes of intellectual ad-
vancement. The very invectives of the preachers,
humorously jealous of the playhouse, prove how little
the good folk of London dreaded the contaminations of
the stage. * Woe is me ! ' cries one in 1586, * the play-

GROWTH AND EXTENSION OF THEATRES. 281

houses are pestered, when churches are naked : at the
one it is not possible to get a place, at the other
void seats are plenty. When the bells toll to the
Lecturer, the trumpets sound to the stages ! '

IV.

Meanwhile the art and industry of acting rose into
comparative respectability, and considerable wealth
was flowing into the coffers of the Companies. * It is
a woeful sight,' groans out the Puritan, ' to see two
hundred proud players jet in their silks, where five
hundred poor people starve in the streets ! ' as though
money acquired in honest service of the public by play-
acting might not be spent upon fine clothes, as well as
money gained by selling cloth or forging broad-swords !
' Over-lashing in apparel,' writes Gosson, * is so com-
mon a fault, that the very hirelings of some of our
players, which stand at reversion of 6^. by the week,
jet under gentlemen's noses in suits of silk, exercising
themselves to prating on the stage and common
scoffing when they come abroad, where they look
askance over the shoulder at every man of whom the
Sunday before they begged an alms.'

Many places of public entertainment had been con-
verted into theatres before the close of the century.
Paris Garden was a circus for bear-baiting, capable
of holding one thousand people, if we may trust
the report of an accident which happened there one
Sunday in 1582. It was fitted up and used for a
playhouse, when Henslowe and Meade took it in 161 3.
On the Bankside in Southwark, near to London

282 SHAKSPERE*S PREDECESSORS.

Bridge, we find a nest of such small theatres : the
Hope, originally a bear-garden ; the Rose, and the
Swan, so called from their signs. Newington Butts
was the tide of a house erected for the convenience of
archers and pleasurers in that suburb. On its boards
* The Jew of Malta/ the first ' Hamlet/ the ' Taming of
the Shrew,' and ' Tamburlaine/ were brought out. The
yard of the * Red Bull * had long been employed for
occasional performances, before the erection of perma-
nent theatres. Late in Elizabeth's reign it was con-
verted into a playhouse of a rough and somewhat
boisterous type ; though excellent playwrights, like
Heywood, wrote for it. The Cockpit, or the Phoenix,
in Drury Lane was also turned into a theatre early in
the reign of James. It too enjoyed no favourable
reputation, being surrounded with houses of ill fame,
which exposed it in 1616 to partial demolition by the
prentices on Shrove Tuesday. Whitefriars and Salis-
bury Court could also boast their theatres. But we
have reason to believe that these two houses may have
occupied the same site, for Whitefriars ceased to
exhibit before Salisbury Court came into notice.

I have hitherto omitted all mention of the two
most famous houses in the annals of the stage, the
Globe and Fortune. The Globe was first erected
in 1593 by Richard Burbage, leader of the Lord
Chamberlain's or King's Men. It stood on the Bank-
side. Street, a builder, was engaged to construct it of
timber. The theatre was hexagon-shaped externally,
and round within. It had two doors, one leading into
the body of the house, the other into the actors* tire-
room. It was open to the air, with the exception of

GLOBE AND FORTUNE, 283

a thatched roof or ' heaven/ projecting over the stage.
The audience stood in the large central place or * yard/
which was railed ofif from the stage. Private boxes
were provided round this yard, for such as chose to
pay for them. This primitive theatre, for ever famous
as the scene of Shakspere's exploits, was burned
down in 161 3 during the performance of a play upon
the history of the reign of Henry VIII. Two small
guns, it appears, were let off in the course of a pageant,
and their discharge set fire to the thatched roof of the
heaven. Next year, the house was rebuilt, at the cost
of James and noblemen, with a tiled roof, * in far
fairer manner than before.' The Company of Burbage
and Shakspere played here in the summer. In the
winter they used their other theatre of Blackfriars.

The Fortune came into existence in 1599. Hen-
slowe and Alleyn caused it to be built by Peter
Street in avowed competition with the Globe. At
this epoch the numerous companies of London had
resolved themselves into two main rival troupes : that
of Burbage and Shakspere, known as the Lord Cham-
berlain's or the King s Men ; and that of Henslowe
and Alleyn, known as the Lord Admiral's, and after-
wards as the Prince Henry's, Men. Shakspere, as
dramatist, actor, and part-owner, gave the tone to
the former of these companies, and supported their
theatrical business with a genius which is now known
to have been incomparable. But, during the period of
Shakspere's management, this vast superiority was not
apparent. Henslowe was a shrewd and stirring man
of affairs, interested in more than one of the best
London theatres, and keeping famous playwrights in

284 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

his service. Alleyn was perhaps the greatest actor of
the English stage. While the Lord Chamberlain's troop
appealed through Shakspere to the highest faculties of
the audience, and showed in their performances a
certain unity of moral and artistic tone ; Henslowe,
on the other hand, knew well how to sustain his
popularity by efficiency in theatrical details, and how
to stimulate the public interest by constant variety.
Consequently the two companies were not ill matched ;
and to their rivalry we owe the unexampled fertility
of our dramatic literature in the first decade of the
seventeenth century.

The success of the Globe pushed Alleyn on to
build the Fortune. It was erected in Golding Lane,
Cripplegate. Up to the time of its destruction by fire
in 1 62 1, it was a square building, of lath and plaster,
measuring eighty feet externally on each of its four
sides. Inside, it measured fifty-five feet each way ; so
that about twelve feet and a half were left for boxes,
galleries, and staircases in front, and tiring-rooms behind
the stage. It had three tiers of boxes, rising twelve,
eleven, and nine feet, one above the other. The stage
was forty-three feet wide, leaving a gangway on each
side into the yard, and twenty- seven feet and a half deep
to the partition of the tiring-room. The * gentlemen's and
twopenny rooms,' or private boxes, had four divisions ;
and the tiring-rooms were furnished with windows.
The stage was fenced with oak ; and the roof — called
'the heaven' or 'the shadow' — was tiled. It stood
upon wooden pillars, carved square and surmounted
with satyrs for capitals. From Alleyn's pocket-book
we gather that the cost of the erection amounted to

PLAYING COMPANIES, 285

520/. This sum, when added to the purchase of the
lease and some adjacent buildings, he reckons at a
total of 880/. The theatre was rebuilt in 1623, after
a conflagration which destroyed the structure, together
with the dresses, properties, and play-books of the
company, in two hours. The new Fortune was pro-
bably of brick.

Thus London at the end of Elizabeth's reign had
at least eleven theatres. Efforts were made, from
time to time, by antagonists of the stage, to reduce
this number to two, the Globe and the Fortune. But
such endeavours proved unavailing ; and when the
Commonwealth put an end to theatres, we know that
six were pulled down and destroyed between 1644 and
1656.^ Corresponding efforts were made to check the
multiplication of companies, and to confine them to
the two which had received Royal Licence, namely,
the Lord Chamberlain's and the Lord Admiral's Men.
These, as we have seen, commanded the largest share
of public favour and attention. But they by no means
enjoyed a monopoly of the stage. In the reign of
James, it became fashionable for players to put them-
selves under the patronage of various members of the
Royal Family. In addition to the servants of the
nobility, we hear of the Queen's Servants and the
Prince Palatine's Servants, not counting minor troops
assembled by private adventurers. The boys attached
to choirs, who took so prominent a share in theatrical
performances, will receive notice in their proper place

* The Globe, April 1644 ; Blackfriars, August 1655 ; Salisbury Court,
March 1649; Phoenix, March 1649; Fortune, 1649; Hope, 1656. These
dates are given on the authority of a letter addressed by Mr. Fumivall to
the Academy y Oct 28, 1882.

286 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and time. From an early period they formed . the
nurseries of actors, and had a separate existence from
that of the playing companies. It must here, how-
ever, be noted, that the Court had a direct interest in
the promotion and encouragement of actors. Masques
and plays formed an indispensable element of the
royal equipage ; lacking which, the Court of England
would have cut but a poor figure by comparison with
the other Courts of Europe. The sovereign s establish-
ment was unable to stand alone. It needed recruiting
grounds and exercising grounds, schools in which the
actors tried their talents on the public. Nor was the
Crown disposed to check the pastimes of the people,
which brought it popularity, and which supplied the
gende youth with entertainment Therefore, the
royal countenance was given, for the Court s sake and
the people's sake, to private speculators. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, in England, the
dramatic business of the metropolis was thus conducted
by two great Companies under the King s patent, and
by the Court, which needed their co-operation and
assistance. Minor troops revolved around these
luminaries as their centres, forming as occasion served,
disbanding, and resolving their component parts into
the main attractive bodies of the Globe, the Fortune,
and Whitehall. When the national party, which had
been hostile to play-acting from the first, became
politically omnipotent, theatres were swept away to-
gether with the Monarchy of England. The intimate
connection between the Court and the Drama is thus
established, and a certain political importance is vindi-
cated for the Puritan tirades against the stage.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE HOUSES. 287

Of the eleven theatres above enumerated, some
were called public, and some private. The latter were
smaller in size, roofed all over, and frequented by a
more select company. Their performances, like those
of the public theatres, took place in the afternoon, but
by candle-light. For night scenes, the windows were
closed to exclude daylight, and some of the torches
were extinguished. Blackfriars, Salisbury Court, and
the Cockpit in Drury Lane (though this is not quite
certain, since the Cockpit had a reputation for low
company) were private houses. The Globe, Fortune,
and Bull, were public. Both classes of theatres
had signs. Hey wood, in the fourth act of his * English
Traveller/ speaks of ' the picture of Dame Fortune
before the Fortune playhouse ; ' and Malone asserts,
on insufficient but not improbable grounds, that the
sign of the Globe was a Hercules supporting the
world.^ When the play was going to begin, the actors
hoisted flags and blew trumpets. Play-bills to an-
nounce the show, were also in common use ; those
of tragedies being printed in red letters. Perform-
ances began at three o'clock in the afternoon, and
averaged about two hours in duration ; so that the
audience came to the theatre at a convenient time
after their dinner, and got away in winter before night-
fall. The piece of the day was generally closed with
an address to the sovereign, recited by the actors
on their knees. Then followed a kind of farce,

^ Comp. Hamlet, act ii. sc 2.

28S SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

technically called a jig, in which the Clown performed
a solo. Jigs were written in rhyme, plentifully inter-
spersed with gag and extempore action.

Entrance prices varied according to the theatre, the
seat, and the kind of exhibition. First representations
seem to have drawn higher sums, and so did actors of
the first celebrity. For the most ordinary shows, three
pennies were paid : * one at the gate, another at the entry
of the scaffold, and a third for quiet standing.* In the
larger theatres there was a place called the * twopenny
room,' which answered to our gallery, and was probably
paid for extra after the entrance fee, which admitted
spectators to the yard or cheapest place. Private
boxes, or compartments in the 'gentlemen's rooms,'
were sold at a higher rate. The doors of these boxes
shut with locks, the keys of which were handed over
to their lessees. The lowest frequenters of the public
theatres, contemptuously alluded to as 'groundlings'
and * stinkards,' stood in the yard beneath the open sky.
In the private theatres, the yard was called the pit,
and was supplied with benches. Spectators of the
more fashionable kind, who frequented theatres to see
and be seen, sat on three-legged stools upon the stage.
At the private theatres they had the right, it seems, to
do so ; but at the public houses they took this place
by force, in defiance of the hissings and hootings of
the groundlings separated from them by the barriers of
the stage. For the use of a stool they paid sixpence,
which was collected after they had taken their seats.
This custom was a great annoyance both to the actors
and the audience ; for the young gallants, who affected
it, showed very little consideration for either. They

PRICES AND PROFITS, 289

exchanged remarks, and chaffed the players, peeled
oranges and threw apples into the yard, puffed tobacco
from pipes lighted by their pages, and flirted with the
women in the neighbouring boxes. It was found
necessary at last to double the price of a * tripod ; '
but it may be doubted whether this served to check
the practice.

Taking various circumstances into consideration, it
may be estimated that on a good night at one of the
larger theatres, prices varying from sixpence to half-
a-crown were paid for a seat

To form an accurate and lively picture of an
Elizabethan stage- performance is not easy from the
meagre references which we now possess. Yet some-
thing of the sort might be attempted. Let us imagine
that the red-lettered play-bill of a new tragedy has
been hung out beneath the picture of Dame Fortune.
The flag is flying from the roof. The drums have
beaten, and the trumpets are sounding for the second
time. It is three o'clock upon an afternoon of summer.
We pass through the great door, ascend some steps,
take our key from the pocket of our trunk-hose, and
let ourselves into our private room upon the first or
lowest tier. We find ourselves in a low square build-
ing, open to the slanting sunlight, built of shabby
wood, not unlike a circus ; smelling of sawdust and the
breath of people. The yard below is crowded with
* sixpenny mechanics,' and prentices in greasy leathern
jerkins, servants in blue frieze with their masters'
badges on their shoulders, boys and grooms, elbowing
each other for bare standing ground and passing coarSe
jests on their neighbours. A similar crowd is in the

290 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

twopenny room above our heads, except that here are
a few flaunting girls. Not many women of respect-
ability are visible, though two or three have taken a
side-box, from which they lean forward to exchange
remarks with the gallants on the stage. Five or six
young men are already seated there before the curtain,
playing cards and cracking nuts to while away the
time. A boy goes up and down among them, offering
various qualities of tobacco for sale, and furnishing
lights for the smokers. The stage itself is strewn with
rushes ; and from the jutting tiled roof of the shadow,
supported by a couple of stout wooden pillars, carved
into satyrs at the top, hangs a curtain of tawny-
coloured silk. This is drawn when the trumpets have
sounded for the third time ; and an actor in a black
velvet mantle, with a crown of bays upon his flowing
wig, struts forward bowing to the audience for atten-
tion. He is the Prologue. He has barely broken into
the jogtrot of his declamation, when a bustle is heard
behind, and a fine fellow comes shouldering past him
from the tire-room followed by a mincing page.

* A stool, boy ! ' cries our courtier, flinging off" his
cloak, and displaying a doublet of white satin and hose
of blue silk. The Prologue has to stand aside, and
falters in his speech. The groundlings hiss, groan,
mew like cats, and howl out, * Filthy ! filthy ! ' It may
also happen that an apple is flung upon the stage, to
notify the peoples disapproval of this interruption.
Undisturbed by these discourtesies, however, the new
comer twirls his moustachios, fingers his sword-hilt, and
nods to his acquaintance. After compliments to the
gentlemen already seated, the gallant at last disposes

PERFORMANCES DESCRIBED, 291

himself in a convenient place of observation, and the
Prologue ends. The first act now begins. There is
nothing but the rudest scenery : a battlemented city-
wall behind the stage, with a placard hung out upon it,
indicating that the scene is Rome. As the play pro-
ceeds, this figure of a town makes way for some wooden
rocks and a couple of trees, to signify the Hyrcanian
forest. A damsel, with a close-shaved chin, wanders
alone in this wood, lamenting her sad case. Suddenly
a cardboard dragon is thrust from the sides upon the
stage, and she takes to flight. The first act closes
with a speech from an old gentleman arrayed in antique
robes, whose white beard flows down upon his chest.
He is the Chorus ; and it is his business to explain
what has happened to the damsel, and how in the next
act her son, a sprightly youth of eighteen years, will
conquer kingdoms. During the course of the play,
music is made use of for the recreation of the audience
with songs and ditties, and much attention is bestowed
upon the costly dresses of the principal performers.
Meanwhile, a cut-purse has been found plying his
trade in the yard. It is a diversion in the interval
between the acts, to see him hoisted with many a cuff"
and kick to the stage. There he is tied tightly to
one of the pillars, and left to linger the performance
out against his will — literally pilloried — pelted and
scoffed at when the audience have nothing else to do.
The show concludes with a Prayer for the Queen's
Majesty, uttered by the actors on their knees. After
this is over, or possibly while it is still in progress, the
spectators make their exit. Those who have come

for rational amusement, pass criticisms on the piece,

u 2

292 SHAICSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

the company, and the poet's wit Others put up the
table-books, to which they have committed memoranda
of choice phrases, epigrams, newfangled oaths, and
definitions fit to air at social gatherings. Young men,
who have scraped acquaintance with some damsel in
the galleries or boxes, conduct the fair Amanda to a
supper in the private room of an adjacent tavern.

VI,

It is difficult for us to realise the simplicity with
which the stage was mounted in the London theatres.
Scenery may be said to have been almost wholly
absent. Even in Masques performed at Court, on
which immense sums of money were lavished, and
which employed the ingenuity of men like Inigo Jones,
effect was obtained by groupings of figures in dances,
by tableaux and processions, gilded chariots, temples,
fountains, and the like, far more than by scene-paint-
ing. Upon the public stage such expenditure had, of
course, to be avoided. Attention was concentrated
on the actors, with whose movements, boldly defined
against a simple background, nothing interfered. The
stage on which they played was narrow, projecting
into the yard, surrounded on all sides by spectators.
Their action was thus brought into prominent relief,
placed close before the eye, deprived of all perspective.
It acquired a special kind of realism, which the vast
distances and manifold artifices of our modem theatres
have rendered unattainable. This was the realism of
an actual event, at which the audience assisted ; not
the realism of a scene to which the audience is trans-

MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF THE STAGE, 293

ported by the painter s skill, and in which the actor
plays a somewhat subordinate part. As might be
expected in a theatre of this description, the actor's
wardrobe was both rich and various. John Alley n's
note-book informs us that he paid as much as 20/.
10^. for one cloak, and 16/. for another costume.
The dresses of a playhouse formed indisputably its
most valuable property. Attention being so closely
and exclusively directed to the players, they were
forced to be appropriately and substantially attired.
Moving, as it were, upon the same plane as the au-
dience, they had to detach themselves from their
surroundings by impressive brilliancy of outfit. This
want of perspective in the Elizabethan stage, and the
absence of scenical appeals to the sense of sight, deter-
mined the style of dramatic composition. Our older
playwrights depended upon the fancy of the audience
to conjure up the scenes which they described. The
luxuriance of their diction can be attributed to the
necessity they felt for stimulating the spectators to an
effort of imagination. Their disregard of place and
time was justified by the conditions of a stage which
left all to the intellect. The mind can contemplate
the furthest Ind as easily as more familiar objects;
nor need it dread to traverse the longest tract of years,
the widest expanse of space, in following the sequence
of an action. It resulted from these circumstances
that the language of the dramatist and the personality
of the actor were all-important. A naked action was
presented by the player to the audience. That naked
action had to be assisted by the playwright's poetry ;
and much that now seems superfluous in the descriptive

294 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

passages of the Elizabethan tragedies, was needed to
excite imagination.^

Even more valuable than the wardrobe was the
library of a theatre. Each company bought and
jealously preserved the MSS. of plays, which became
its exclusive property, until such time as the author
obtained leave to print it, or some publisher contrived
to pirate it One of the strongest charges brought
against Robert Greene was, that he had sold the same
play to two rival companies ; and complaints are
frequently made that mutilated copies of a comedy
had got abroad without the owner's sanction. Short-
hand writers frequented theatres for the express pur-
pose of taking down the text of a new play, which
they conveyed to press or sold to a competing set of
actors. This custom partly accounts for the infamous
state in which we have received many dramas — blank
verse reduced to chaos, phrases misunderstood, and
speeches clearly compressed to suit the scribes con-
venience. The extraordinary indifference of play-
wrights must also be taken into account Heywood
and Marston repeatedly protest against the publication
of plays which they had written to be acted. Having
placed the MS. in the hands of the manager, and
received their money for it, the authors thought it
worth no more attention. Jonson was sneered at for
styling his plays * Works ; ' and Webster got the
reputation of a pedant for taking pains about the
appearance of his tragedies in print. With time, how-

* It may be worth quoting a passage from Tom Coryat, who, in his
CrudititSy observes that the comic theatre in Venice is * very beggarly
and base in comparison of our stately playhouses in England ; neither
can their actors compare with ours for apparel, shows, and music'

PRICES PAID FOR PLAYS. 295

ever, dramatists began to superintend the publication
of their own plays. With or without their permission,
these things reached the press. The public bought
them for sixpence, and read them with avidity.
Authors perceived that they could make a profit from
the publisher, and receive a handsome sum from the
patron to whom they inscribed their composition. It
was also to their interest to see that works which bore
their name, appeared without gross blemishes.

VII.

The.sums paid for a play varied considerably. The
Diary of Philip Henslowe makes it clear that up to
the year 1600 the highest price he ever paid was 8/.
or 9/. He gave Drayton, Dekker, and Chettle only
4/. for a History of Henry I. Jonson, Porter, and
Chettle received from him 6/. for a comedy called
' Hot Anger soon Cold.* Greene sold ' Orlando
Furioso ' for something over 7/. Ben Jonson raised
the price of plays to a minimum of 10/. In * Histrio-
mastix/ the poet-scholar Chrisoganus, when asked,
* What s the lowest price ? ' answers :

You know as well as I ; ten pound the play.

Henslowe occupied a somewhat singular position in
dramatic society. He was part-owner of the For-
tune and several other theatres. As manager and
impresario, he came into business relations with actors
and authors who were not, like Shakspere, exclu-
sively devoted to the Globe. But he also appears to
have established a kind of brokerage between the

296 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

companies and playwrights, by means of which he
made much private profit. He speculated on the
necessities of authors, advancing money to secure their
services or to help them at a pinch. Some of the
needier quill-drivers, a Daborne or a Munday or a
Chetde, were thus always in his debt ; and he drove
hard bargains with them. Daborne, in one of his
letters to Henslowe, complains that the playing Com-
pany would have given 20/. for his labour, which
seems to prove that die broker had some previous
claim upon him. Or else we may suppose that
the Company's pay involved participation in their
profits, whereas Henslowe paid in cash and took
the risks. A passage in the * Actors' Remonstrance '
points to the habit of securing the service of play-
wrights by 'annual stipends and beneficial second-
days ; ' and we know that it was customary to allow the
playwright a benefit upon the second or third day, or
both. Daborne stipulates with Henslowe for * but 1 2/.
and the overplus of the second day.' A large propor-
tion of Elizabethan plays were the joint production of
several authors, who must have had their own system
of dividing profits. In some cases the playwrights
collaborated to save time in * firking up ' a comedy or
history. Other instances, where several names are
printed on a title-page, point to the remodelling of
popular plays by new hands. Or a poet would add
prologue and epilogue to a piece which needed some
fresh attraction. For this sort of service Henslowe
generally paid 5^. Still, we have every reason to
believe that the practice of genuine collaboration in
the concoction of a drama was common. It does not

BOY' ACTORS, 297

SO much argue good fellowship among the dramatists,
though that undoubtedly existed, as their thoroughly
business-like conception of their craft. A play had to
be produced for a certain price, and they applied the
principle of divided labour to its composition, careless
of posterity, seeking money profit more than fame.
When play-writing became fashionable, poets from the
universities with tedious tragedies, persons of quality
with stupid comic pieces to dispose of, had to pay the
managers to get their rubbish acted. It may here be
mentioned that in the flourishing period of the Drama,
playwrights very commonly were also actors and ma-
nagers of theatres. Marlowe and Heywood, Shak-
spereand Jonson, to mention only the more prominent,
served their apprenticeship as players to the stage.
Cyril Toumeur took a company across the seas to
act in Flanders. Davenant in 1639 obtained letters
patent for erecting what would have been the largest
theatre in London.

VIII.

Considering how little the Elizabethan Drama owed
to scenery and mounting, and how wholly it depended
for interpretation upon acting, the facts we know about
stage-players are not a little astonishing. First and
foremost, actresses were never seen upon the stage.^
Beardless youths * boyed the greatness ' of Cleopatra

^ A strong feeling prevailed in England against actresses. In 1629 a
French company came over and played at Blackfriars. Prynne, in his
Histtiomastix^ terms the actresses among them, 'French women or
monsters rather.' They were not well received, but on the contrary were
* hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage.' See Collier, i. 452.

298 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

and Lady Macbeth. Hobbledehoys 'squeaked' out
the pathos of Desdemona and Juliet's passion. Some-
times the beard and broken voice were only too
apparent in these male performers of female parts.
' O, my old friend ! ' says Hamlet, when he greets the
players : ' thy face is valanced since I saw thee last ;
comest thou to beard me in Denmark } What, my
young lady and mistress ! ByV lady, your ladyship is
nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the
altitude of a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like a
piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the
ring.'

It appears that boys who acted female characters
received higher pay than adults. This arose, no
doubt, from the difficulty of finding lads sufficiently
good-looking and well-educated to sustain a woman's
part with dignity and grace. It was only for a short
while that their capacity for representing women lasted ;
and during those few years they were much sought
after. When their beards grew and their voices broke,
they proceeded to the common business of the theatre.
From a * Dialogue of Plays and Players ' written after
the Restoration, we glean a few details respecting these
boy-actors. * Hart and Clun,' says Trueman, ' were
bred up boys at the Blackfriars, and acted women's
parts. Hart was Robinson's boy or apprentice ; he
acted the Duchess in the tragedy of ** The Cardinal,"
which was the first part that gave him reputation.'
Durfey, who had seen Hart play in Chapman's * Bussy
d'Ambois,' calls him * that eternally renowned and best
of actors.' He took the part in a revival of the tragedy
in 1675. The same interlocutor adds further on:

NORTHBROOKE ON BOYS ACTING. 299

* Amy n tor was played by Stephen Hammerton, who
was at first a most noted and beautiful woman-actor,
but afterwards he acted with equal grace and applause
a young lover s part'

In the infancy of the theatre, it was customary for
whole plays to be performed by boys. At the great
schools, Eton and Westminster for instance, acting
formed a part of the ordinary course of education,
combining exercise in memory and elocution with
honest recreation. When Northbrooke published his
sweeping condemnation of the stage in 1577, he made
an exception in favour of these private performances.

* I think it is lawful for a schoolmaster to practise his
scholars to play comedies, observing these and the like
cautions : first, that those comedies which they shall
play be not mixed with any ribaldry and filthy terms
and words. Secondly, that they be for learning and
utterance' sake, in Latin, and very seldom in English.
Thirdly, that they use not to play commonly and often,
but very rare and seldom. Fourthly, that they be not
pranked and decked up in gorgeous and sumptuous
apparel in their play. Fifthly, that it be not made
a common exercise, publicly, for profit and gain of
money, but for learning and exercise' sake. And lastly,
that their comedies be not mixed with vain and wanton
toys of love.' Northbrooke's rules and regulations for
boy -actors were consistently violated in practice. The
choristers of cathedral and royal foundations, the Child-
ren of the Queen's Chapel, of Windsor and of S. Paul's,
became public actors, and performed upon the common
stage. 1 1 also appears that great men, who patronised
the theatre, kept companies of boys as well as adult

300 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

players; thus we hear of Leicester s boys in 1577-
The custom of combining the duties of the choir and
the theatre dated from the earliest times of Mysteries
and Miracles. The Children of Pauls petitioned
Richard II. in 1378 against the performance of sacred
pageants by lewd and ignorant people, which interfered
with their monopoly. The same choir, numbering
thirty-eight boys, exhibited a Latin play before Henry
VIII. in 1528, when Luther was brought upon the
stage and satirised. It is clear from many sources that
the theatrical establishments of royal and noble per-
sons were attached to their chapels ; and we have
already seen that the exhibition of Miracles was at
first in the hands of the clergy. This helps to ex-
plain what seems to us the anomaly of choristers
being avowedly dedicated to the stage, and of reli-
gious foundations being used as nurseries for actors.
Elizabeth, in 1586, gave letters patent to Thomas
Gyles, then Master of the Children of Paul's, em-
powering him to enlist and press into his service
likely lads. In this, and in subsequent patents down
to the year 1626, when Puritan opinions were gain-
ing strength, and when the scandals of the public
stage had grown notorious, the employment of the
choristers of Paul's and of the Chapel Royal in
dramatic business was always specially contemplated.
The singing-room at S. Pauls became a theatre, where
the public gained admittance upon payment. So far
from exhibiting harmless comedies for educational
exercise, these children uttered seditious matter during
the Martin Marprelate controversy, and had to be
silenced for some years after 1589. The Children of
the Chapel Royal, recruited under similar privileges,

CHILDREN OF THE CHAP^LS. idX

and with the same avowed object of providing the
Queen with suitable actors, took the name of Children
of her Majesty's Revels. They played at Blackfriars,
when this theatre was not used by the King's Servants,
and had the monopoly of some of the best dramas of
the period, including two or three of Jonson's. At
last, in 1626, acting came to be thought inconsistent
with a chorister's duties in church. A warrant granted
to Nathaniel Giles in that year, provides that the boys
enlisted by him for the Chapel Royal shall not be
employed as comedians, * for that it is not fit or decent
that such as should sing the praises of God Almighty,
should be trained or employed in such lascivious and
profane exercises.' ^

A list of the boys who acted in * Cynthia's Revels '
shows that several lived to be distinguished members
of their profession. On one of them, Salathiel Pavy,
who died in early youth, Jonson wrote the beautiful
elegy beginning :

Weep with me, all you that read

This little story ;
And know, for whom a tear you shed,

Death^s self is sorry.
'T was a child, that so did thrive

In grace and feature,
As Heaven and nature seemed to strive

Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen.

When fates turned cruel ;
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been

The stage's jewel.

* All the treatises against the stage dwell on the impropriety of boys
disguising as women, and learning to affect the manners and passions
of the female sex (see Third Blast, p. 147 ; Gosson's Plays Confuted^
pp. 195-197 ; Short Treatise, p. 243). But none hint at any very scan-
dalous inconveniences resulting therefrom.

SHAA'Sc£Li\Z S

Jocs-Q Specially coaunenvis y:ur^ F^'-y for his just
representation of old men ! The Children of Black-
friars were ver\' popular, and had iheir partisans
among the foe3 and the public, who preferred them to
any company of adult actors. In a tract attributed to
Thonxas Middleton \dare 1604 . ^^y ^-^ mentioned as
a nest oi boys able 10 ra\'ish a man.' Shakspere
thinks it worth while to run ihen: down in " Hamlet ;'
where Kosencrantz is made to s^<ak of ' an aery of
children, litde e\-asses" who *are now the fashion.
beratde the common sta^xes.' and carr\- awav • Hercules
and his load too ' — ^an allusion. perr«ips. to the sign of
the Globe Theatre. The Children of Paul's were not
iess in requesL Their singini:-rvX^n: had the ad\-antage
of Cleanliness and a select audience. A personage in
'Jack Drum's Entertainment' \da:e locil is made to

To U":£ *Mni;Y -ackc: ox* jl 'r<vr>"r-riTir.

It IS dimcult to conceive how c\>n:plex and passion-
ate action can have been adev^uAtely represented by
these boy-players of the a^ie of thirteen. The con-
jecrure mi^ht perhaps bo hararded. th.\t plays expressly
written for them — those of 1 onson for example — took a
certain nx:t\- of tj-pe and hardness of outline from the
exigencies under which the poet worked. Compared
\i-ith Shakspere's art, that of J onson is certainly distin-
guished by formality. Instead of pen>ons, he presents
incarnate t>-pes and humours. Has this to do with the
fact that while Shakspere wrote for his own company

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING, 303

of men, Jonson knew that he was writing for boys ?
From this point of view, it would be interesting to
collect and analyse the plays which were composed for
boy-actors by the boys' poets.

However this may be, it cannot be questioned that
the dramatic training of young men furnished the
English theatre with an admirable body of players.
Professionals like Nat Field, who had been reared
among the Children of Blackfriars, were acquainted from
the cradle with the business of their craft. After a like
fashion, the Court and domestic fools of a previous age
had founded a tradition of broad comic acting, which
rose by degrees above buffoonery, retaining its raci-
ness of homespun humour, and rendering the Clowns
of Shakspere possible. Pursuing the same train of
thought, we are led to note how the musical ability of
choristers, accustomed to sing anthems and madrigals,
encouraged the poets to introduce those lyrics into plays
which form so effective an element in their scenes.
On all sides, the more we study its conditions, the
better we perceive how workmanlike and businesslike
a thing our Drama was. It had nothing amateurish
about it. And though we may attribute some of its
shortcomings to this cause, we must also reckon it
among the most serious advantages possessed by our
theatre in the Elizabethan age.

IX.

y\ctors were usually partners in the business of a
theatre. They were classified as sharers, three-fourths
sharers, one-half sharers, and hired men. This system

364 SHAI^SPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

of payment connected the pecuniary interests of the
performers directly with those of the theatre, and re-
lieved the manager of much personal responsibility.
Henslowe's Diary informs us that 15/. was paid by an
actor for a whole share in bad times, and 9/. for half a
share in more favourable circumstances. How the pro-
fits were divided, we do not exactly know. Henslowe,
who took care as a capitalist to secure the lion s share
in all his ventures, pocketed the large sum of 4/. after
one performance of * The Jew of Malta/ and on another
occasion, when * Woman Hard to Please ' was played,
he netted 6/. js. Sd. Besides his share, a celebrated
actor might also receive a salary. Nat Field took 6s, a
week in addition to his portion of the profits. Hired
men were under the control of the proprietors or
lessees of the theatre. They worked at fixed wages,
and had no direct interest in the business. Lads of
ten entered into articled engagements. Their masters,
usually actors, sometimes managers of theatres, taught
them their trade and pocketed their earnings. Hart,
we have already heard, was Robinson's apprentice.
Beeston, a famous player at the Cockpit, had for his
apprentices Burt, Mohun, and Shatterel, who went on
playing after the Restoration. Henslowe records the
purchase of a boy from William Augustine for 8/.
Augustine must have trained the boy, holding under
indentures the right to use him for his own profit.

Performances at Court were a source of considerable
gain to acting companies. After 1574, 10/. was the
regular sum paid by her Majesty for a performance.
Like rewards were given by noblemen and gentry, at
whose houses the players attended. This we gather

STROLLING COMPANIES, 305

from a poor comedy called ' Histriomastix/ which
contains a curiously realistic altercation between the
Usher and Steward of a great house and a company of
actors on the tramp, about the payment of a play :

Ten pounds a play, or no point Comedy !

To perform without licence from the local authorities,
or without the badge of some known magnate, was
strictly forbidden by statutes. These regulations, how-
ever, were commonly avoided, and players took what
name they pleased :

But whose men are we all this while ?

exclaims a clownish actor in * Histriomastix,' who does
not know that he is being passed off as a member of
Sir Oliver Owlet's company.

Large London troops not unfrequently dispersed
in time of plague. They would then tramp * upon the
hard hoof from village to village,' receiving small pay
unless they chanced upon some hospitable noble's
house in holiday, but carefully distinguished from the
* roguish players ' who travelled without licence. The
Induction to Shakspere's 'Taming of the Shrew' fur-
nishes a pretty instance of such acquaintance as might
well subsist between a lord and an actor. On this point
it must be added that James L in 1603 put an end to
the noblemen's privilege of licensing players as their
servants. Henceforward, companies endeavoured to
obtain patents from the Crown or licences from royal
personages. All others strolling the country were
liable to arrest as ' wandering rogues.* In London
the regular actors gave tone to Bohemian society.
Taverns frequented by the best of them, the Mermaid

3o6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and the Triple Tun for example, were sought out by
men of fashion. Young fellows, who wished to cut a
figure in society, aped the manners of these artists and
repeated their jokes. Play-going citizens pursued them
with tiresome but profitable adulation. To be an actor's
Ingle, or intimate and crony, was the ambition of many
a foolish saddler or cordwainer s prentice.

It is certain that acting reached a very high pitch of
excellence in the days of Burbage and Alleyn, Summer
and Tarlton. Shakspere could not have written for in-
ferior players those parts which at the present time tax
histrionic talent beyond its faculty. As the absence
of theatrical machinery helped playwrights to be poets,
so the capacity of actors stimulated literary genius to
the creation of characters, which the author knew
beforehand would be finely and intelligently rendered.
Yet, in spite of the elevation which the playwright's
and the actor s arts attained at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, a permanent and persistent dis-
honour attached to the stage. This was due to the
local surroundings of the theatres in London, to the
habits of a largely popular audience, and to the old re-
ligious abhorrence which gathered virulence together
with the spread of Puritan opinions.^

In the origins of the stage, theatres were closely
connected with houses of public entertainment — inns,
hostelries, places of debauch, and brothels. The Cor-
poration forced companies to seek permanent establish-

* Jonson in the Poetaster satirises all this system in the person of Histrio.

MANNERS AT THEATRES. 307

ment in suburbs, where the Court and City alike sought
questionable recreation. What a tavern was in those
days, may be gathered from the gross outspoken
dialogues of * The Prodigal Son ; ' a play cast back on
us from Germany without the benefit of censure.^ Such
taverns were the first homes of the public drama.
When theatres came into existence, drinking-shops of
the old sort and houses of ill-fame sprang up around
them. They formed a nucleus for what was vile,
adventurous, and hazardous in the floating population.
This explains and justifies the opposition of the civic
dignitaries. The actual habits of the audience in a
London theatre may be imagined from more or less
graphic accounts given by contemporary satirists.
Gosson, in * The School of Abuse,' writes as follows :

* In our assemblies at plays in London, you shall see
such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering
to sit by women ; such care for their garments, that
they be not trod on ; such eyes to their laps, that no
chips light in them ; such pillows to their backs, that
they take no hurt ; such masking in their ears, I know not
what ; such giving them pippins, to pass the time ; such
playing at foot-saunt without cards ; such ticking, such
toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning
them home when the sports are ended, that it is a right
comedy to mark their behaviour, to watch their conceits,
as the cat for the mouse, and as good as a course at the
game itself to dog them a little, or follow aloof by the
print of their feet, and so discover by slot where the
deer taketh soil.'

Stubbes, in his ' Anatomy of Abuses,' may be quoted

' School of Shakspere^ vol. ii.
X 2

3oS SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

to like purpose : ' But mark the flocking and running
to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and
day, time and tide, to see Plays and Interludes, where
such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laugh-
ing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping
and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes
and the like is used as is wonderful to behold. Then
these goodly pageants being ended, every mate sorts to
his mate, every one brings another homeward of their
way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves covertly
they play the sodomites or worse/

The private rooms in neighbouring taverns, where
girls were taken for seduction, or young men led astray
by wanton women, had been specially denounced under
the Orders of the Common Council/ Gosson, in his
' Plays Confuted in Five Actions,* says : * It is the fashion
of youths to go first into the yard, and to carry their eye
through every gallery ; then, like unto ravens, where
they spy carrion thither they fly, and press as near to
the fairest as they can. Instead of pomegranates, they
give them pippins ; they dally with their garments to
pass the time ; they minister talk upon all occasions ;
and either bring them home to their houses on small
acquaintance, or slip into taverns when the play is done.*
Players are accused by Prynne of being go-betweens,
and playhouses of being the purlieus of corruption.
* Our common strumpets and adulteresses, after our
stage-plays are ended, are oftentimes prostituted near
our playhouses, if not in them. Our theatres, if they
are not bawdy-houses, as they may easily be, since many
players, if reports be true, are common panders, yet

^ See above, p. 271.

CHARGES OF IMMORALITY. 309

they are cousin-germans, at leastwise neighbours to
them/ In * The Actors Remonstrance/ 1643, this
abuse of the player's vocation is ingenuously admitted :
* We have left off for our own parts, and so have com-
manded our servants to forget that ancient custom
which formerly rendered men of our quality infamous,
namely the inveigling in young gentlemen, merchants*
factors, and prentices to spend their patrimonies and
masters' estates upon us and our harlots in taverns. . .
We shall for the future promise never to admit into
our sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing har-
lots that sit there merely to be taken up by apprentices
or lawyers* clerks.** Young men came to find their
partners for the evening there, as some do now at
Music-halls. Cockaine, in a prologue, certifies :

If perfumed wantons do, for eighteenpence.
Expect an angel, and alone go hence,
We shall be glad.

Women of loose life frequented them, as they do
contemporary places of public recreation. A personage
in one of Glapthorne's comedies makes protest :

We are
Gentlemen, ladies ; and no city foremen.
That never dare be venturous on a beauty,
Unless when wenches take them up at plays,
To entice them to the next licentious tavern.
To spend a supper on them.

Girls of good character scarce dared to enter a play-
house. From ballads of the period we learn what was
the peril to their reputations :

> Roxburghe Library, issue for 1869, pp. 260, 265.

3IO SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Thither our city damsels speed,

leaving their mistress' work undone,

To meet some gallant, who indeed

Doth only seek, when they are won,
Away from them eftsoons to run :

WTien they are served, they are content

To scorn their seely instrument.

Another ballad- writer lays it down that a modest
wife should eschew theatres : *

I would not have her go to plays,
To see lewd actors in their parts.

And cause the men upon her gaze.

As they would sigh out all their hearts :

Methinks a wife it ill becomes

To haunt their prologue trump and drums.

This aspect of theatres, considered as the snares of
prentices, the gins where women lost and sold their
characters, has been vividly delineated in the * Amanda,'
of Thomas Cranley (date 1 635). The author is address-
ing a woman of the town :

The places thou dost usually frequent

Is to some playhouse in an afternoon.

And for no other meaning and intent

But to get company to sup with soon ;

More changeable and wavering than the moon,

And with thy wanton looks attracting to thee

The amorous spectators for to woo thee.

Thither thou com'st in several forms and shapes
To make thee still a stranger to the place,

And train new lovers, like young birds, to scrapes.
And by thy habit so to change thy face :
At this time plain, to-morrow all in lace :
: Now in the richest colours may be had ;

The next day all in mourning, black and sad.

1 In support of this extract see the curions story about a citizen's wife
and the players Richard Burbage and William Shakspere, quoted from
The Barrister^ 5 Diary by Collier, i. 319. The Actor^ Remonstrance is
eloquent upon the subject of amours between handsome young players
and women partial to the theatre.

'AMANDA AND 'THE YOUNG GALLANT} 311

In a stuff waistcoat and a petticoat,

Like to a chamber-maid thou com'st to-day :

The next day after thou dost change thy note ;

Then like a country wench thou com'st in grey,
And sittest like a stranger at the play :

To-morrow after that, thou com'st again

In the neat habit of a citizen.

The next day rushing in thy silken weeds.

Embroidered, laced, perfumed, in glittering show ;

So that thy look an admiration breeds,
Rich like a lady and attended so.
As brave as any countess dost thou go.

Thus Proteus-like strange shapes thou venturest on,

And changes hue with the cameleon.

XI.

A poem published by the old Shakespeare Society
graphically depicts the habits of a young man about
town, and his humours at the theatre. It was written
by Francis Lenton, and printed under the title of
*The Young Gallant's Whirligig* in 1629. The lad
has been sent up to study law at one of the Inns of
Court. But the money which his parents provide for
the purchase of books, he spends on * fencing, dancing,
and other sports.*

No, no, good man, he reads not Littleton,
But Don Quix-Zot, or else the Knight of the Sun.
Instead of Perkins' pedlar's French, he says
He better loves Ben Jonson's book of plays.
But that therein of wit he finds such plenty-
That he scarce understands a jest of twenty.

As the terms fly past, his father sends him more
money to defray the expenses of his studies and his call
to the bar. This he lays out upon fine clothes :

312 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

This golden ass, in this hard iron age,

Aspireth now to sit upon the stage ;

Looks round about, then views his glorious self,

Throws money here and there, swearing Hang pelf !

He gets entangled in love-affairs, treats penny-a-
lining poets to pots of ale for sonnets, which he sends
to his mistress, and frequents the cheaper playhouses
in search of new adventures :

Your theatres he daily doth frequent,
Except the intermitted time of Lent,
Treasuring up within his memory
The amorous toys of every comedy
With deep delight ; whereas, he doth appear
Within God's temple scarcely once a year.
And that poor once more tedious to his mind
Than a year's travail to a toiling hind.

This gives the satirist occasion for a diatribe against
the stage :

Plays are the nurseries of vice, the bawd
That through the senses steals our hearts abroad ;
Tainting our ears -with obscene bawdery.
Lascivious words, and wanton ribaldry ;
Charming the casements of our souls, the eyes,
To gaze upon bewitching vanities.
Beholding base loose actions, mimic gesture
By a poor boy clad in a princely vesture.
These are the only tempting baits of hell.
Which draw more youth unto the damned cell
Of furious lust, than all the devil could do
Since he obtained his first overthrow.
Here Idleness, mixed with a wandering mind.
Shall such variety of objects find
That ten to one his will may break the fence
Of reason, and embrace concupiscence.
Or, if this miss, there is another gin.
Close-linked unto this taper-house of sin,
That will entice you unto Bacchus* feasts,
'Mongst gallantsjthat^have been his ancient guests.
There to carouse it till the welkin roar.
Drinking full bowls until their bed's the floor.

LIFE ABOUT TOWN. 313

The gallant's father dies ; and he inherits the paternal
lands. Then he plunges into new extravagance ;
buys coach and horses ; maintains mistresses ; decks
himself out in silks and satins and Bristol diamonds,
bought by him for Oriental gems. His former haunts
are abandoned for more fashionable places of resort :

The Cockpit heretofore would serve his wit,
But now upon the Friars* stage he '11 sit :
It must be so, though this expensive fool
Should pay an angel for a paltry stool

As might be expected, our gallants whirligig runs
round to ruin. His costly wardrobe has to be sold :

His silken garments, and his satin robe.
That hath so often visited the Globe,
And all his spangled, rare, perfumed attires.
Which once so glistered in the torchy Friars,
Must to the broker's to compound his debt,
Or else be pawned to procure him meat

I have only selected those lines from the satire
which illustrate the manners of the theatre. With
regard to the habit of carrying fine clothes to the stage,
for exhibition and effect, a parallel passage might
be quoted from Ben Jonson's 'The Devil is an Ass'
(Act I. sc. 3). One of the personages in the play,
Fabian Fitzdottrel, a squire of Norfolk, is speaking :

Here is a cloak cost fifty pound, wife.
Which I can sell for thirty, when I have seen
All Lx)ndon in 't, and London has seen me.
To-day I go to the Blackfriars playhouse.
Sit in the view, salute all my acquaintance,
Rise up between the acts, let fall my cloak,
Publish a handsome man and a rich suit ;
As that 's a special end why we go thither.
All that pretend to stand for 't on the stage ;
The ladies ask. Who 's that ? for they do come
To see us, love, as we do to see them.

314 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

That 50/., though an extravagant, was no extra-
ordinary price for a cloak, is certain from the items
paid out of the privy purse for masquing dresses.*
In one bill the wife of Charles I. discharged 1,630/. for
embroidery alone. No wonder the old dramatists so
frequently exclaim that gentlemen and city madams
carried farms and acres on their backs, and stowed
estates away in their wardrobes.

It is not to be imagined — ^putting these direct
witnesses aside — that the theatres of Elizabethan were
much purer than the theatres of Victorian London.
Customs in that epoch were far more strongly marked ;
manners coarser; vice more open and avowed. There-
fore we may well believe that City scruples, Court
restrictions, and Puritan prejudices were in a measure
justified. It is also certain that an appreciable social
stigma — the stigma under which his sonnets show
that Shakspere smarted, the stigma of which Jonson
bluntly speaks in his * Hawthornden Conversations' —
attached to poets who wrote for the stage, and to
players who interpreted their works.^ When the
Puritans took the upper hand, scruples, restrictions, and
prejudices became persecution, prohibition, and crusade.
The theatre was then summarily and abruptly put an
end to.

XII.

These were the conditions under which our Drama
came to its perfection. This was the theatre for

. ^ See details in the following chapter on Masques.

• This fact is proved by the curious character of the Player drawn in
The Rich Cabinet^ 161 6, republished in Koxbur|;he Library, 1869, p. 228.

ENGLISH AND ATTIC DRAMAS, 315

which Shakspere wrote, where Shakspere acted, where
Shakspere gained a livelihood and saved a competence.
In slums and suburbs, purlieus and base quarters of the
town, stood those wooden sheds which echoed to the
verses of the greatest poet of the modem world.
Disdainfully protected by the Court, watched with
disfavour by the City; denounced by Puritans and
preachers, patronised by prentices and mechanics, the
Muse of England took her station on the public boards
beneath a misty London daylight, or paced, half-
shrouded in tobacco smoke, between the murky torches
of the private stage. Compare her destiny with that of
her Athenian elder sister. In the theatre of Dionysos,
scooped for a god's worship from the marble flanks of
the Acropolis, ringed with sculptured thrones of priests
and archons, entertained at public cost, honoured in its
solemn ceremonials with crowns and prizes worthy of
the noblest names, the Muse of the dramatic art in
Athens dwelt a Queen confessed. To serve her rites
with costly liturgies, conferred distinction on the fore-
most citizens. To attend her high-tides, was the privi-
lege and pleasure of a congregated nation. To compete
for her rewards was the glory of warriors, ambassadors,
men of birth and fashion, princes — of iEschylus, of
Sophocles, of Agathon, of Dionysius. Religion, national
enthusiasm, public expenditure, private ambition, com-
bined with the highest genius in art and literature to
dignify, consecrate, enrich, immortalise the clients of
the Attic stage. For scenery, there were the sea and
mountains, the Parthenon and Propylaea, over-arched
with skies of Hellas. For audience, the people of
Athens, *ever delicately marching through most pel-

3i6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

lucid air.' It is not to be wondered that a monumental
splendour and sublimity distinguishes what still survives
of Attic tragedy and comedy. It is not to be wondered
that the works of our Elizabethan plaj^wrights should
be incomplete and fragmentary, grandiose by accident,
perfect only «n portions, imposing in their mass and
multitude more than in single masterpieces. The
marvel rather is that on such a theatre as that of
London, Shakspere should have risen like a sun, to
give light to the heavens of modem poetry. The
marvel is that round him should be gathered such a con-
stellation— planets of Marlowe's, Jonson s, Webster's,
Fletcher's magnitude, each ruling his own luminous
house of fame. In the history of literature, the
Elizabethan Drama is indeed a paradox and problem.
Nothing so great and noble has emerged elsewhere
from such dishonour. Those who seek to harmonise
this paradox, to solve this problem, find their answer
in the fact that England's spirit, at that epoch, pene-
trated and possessed the stage. The fact itself is
scarcely explicable. Yet the fact remains. At some
decisive moments of world-history, art, probably with-
out the artist's consciousness, gives self-expression to a
nation. One of these moments was the age of Elizabeth
and James. One of these elect nations was England.
The art whereby we English found expression, was the
Drama.

3*7

CHAPTER IX.

MASQUES AT COURT.

I. Definition of the Masque— Its Courtly Character — Its Partial Influence
over the Regular Drama. — II. Its Italian Origin. — III. Masques at
Rome in 1474 — At Ferrara in 1502 — Morris Dances — At Urbino in
1 5 13 — Triumphal Cars. — IV. Florentine Trionfi — Machinery and
Engines — The Marriage Festivals of Florence in 1565 — Play and
Masques of Cupid and Psyche — The Masque of Dreams — Marriage
Festival of Bianca Capello in 1579. — V. Reception of Henri III. at
Venice in 1 574 — His Passage from Murano to San Niccol6 on Lido.
— VI. The Masque transported to England — At the Court of
Henry VI 1 1, and Elizabeth — Development in the Reign of James I. —
Specific Character of the English Masque — The Share of Poetry in its
Success. — VII. Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones — Italian and English
Artists — The Cost of Masques. — VIII. Prose Descriptions of Masques
— Jonson's Libretti — His Quarrels with Jones — Architect 7/^r«/j Poet —
IX. Royal Performers — Professionals in the Anti-Masque. — X. Variety
of Jonson's Masques — Their Names — Their Subjects — Their Lyric
Poetry. — XI. Feeling for Pastoral Beauty — Pan's Anniversary. —
XII. The Masque of Beauty — Prince Henry's Barriers — Masque of
Oberon. — XIII. Royal and Noble Actors — Lady Arabella Stuart —
Prince Henry — Duke Charles — The Earl and Countess of Essex —
Tragic Irony and Pathos of the Masques at Court. — XIV. Effect of
Masques upon the Drama — Use of them by Shakspere and Fletcher
— By Marston and Toumeur — Their great Popularity — Milton's
Partiality for Masques — The * Arcades ' and * Comus.*

The Masque in England was a dramatic species,
occupying a middle place between a Pageant and a Play.
It combined dancing and music with lyric poetry and
declamation, in a spectacle characterised by magni-
ficence of presentation. It made but little demand
on histrionic talent. The persons who performed a

3i8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Masque had only to be noble in appearance, richly
dressed, and dignified in movement The real authors
and actors were the poet, who planned the motive ; the
mechanist, who prepared the architectural surroundings,
shifted the scenes, and devised the complicated engines
requisite for bringing cars upon the stage or lowering
a goddess from the heavens ; the scene-painter ; the
milliner ; the leader of the band ; the teacher of the
ballet In the hands of these collaborating artists, the
performers were little more than animated puppets.
They played their parts sufficiently, provided their
costumes were splendid and their carriage stately.
Therefore the Masque became a favourite amusement
with wealthy amateurs and courtiers aiming at effect
Since it implied a large expenditure on costly dresses,
jewels, gilding, candlelights, and music, it was an
indulgence which only the rich could afford. For its
proper performance, a whole regiment of various crafts-
men, each excellent in his degree and faculty, had to
be employed. We are thus prepared to understand
why the Masque was emphatically a branch of Court
parade, in which royal personages and the queens of
fashion trod the dais of Greenwich or Whitehall in
gala dress on festival occasions. The principal actors
posed upon this private stage as Olympian deities
or Personifications of the Virtues, surrounded by a
crowd of ballet-dancers, singers, lutists, and buffoons.
All the elements of scenic pomp — the Pageant, the
Triumph, the Morris-dance, the Tournament, the Pas-
toral, the Allegorical Procession — were pressed into
the service of this medley. And to make a perfect
Masque after the English fashion, accomplished actors

DEFINITION OF THE MASQUE. 31$

from the open stage and musicians had to lend their
aid, who played the comic parts and sang the lyrics
written for them by a poet capable of mastering and
controlling the spirit of a hybrid so peculiar.

On public theatres there was but little scope for
Masques. Yet the species influenced our dramatic
style in many important points. Shows which mimicked
Masques at Court were often introduced into the regu-
lar drama, both as motives in the plot, and also for
spectacular effect. To what an extent they imposed
upon imagination, appears in the language of the
poets. Marston uses this striking simile in one of his
tragic plays :

Night, like a Masque, is entered heaven's great hall
With thousand torches ushering her way.

Milton, in his * Ode on the Nativity,' describes the
descent of Peace to earth, in a stanza which paints a
common episode of such performances :

But he, her fears to cease,
Sent down the meek-eyed Peace ;
She, crowned with olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphere,
His ready harbinger,
With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing ;
And, waving wide her myrtle wand,
She strikes an universal peace through sea and land.

11.

The Masque came to England from Italy. In the
first historical mention made of it, Hall writes : ' On the
Day of Epiphany at night, the king with eleven other
were disguised after the manner of Italy, called a

326 StIAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Mask, a thing not seen before in England/ The date
was 15 12-13. The king was Henry VIII. Up to
this time we read in the Court records of pageants,
morices, disguisings, interkides, plays, revels. The
Masque was recognised as a new thing, combining and
absorbing other previous State-shows. After the same
date, the terms of * maskelyn ' and * masculers ' occur
in * Records of the Revels,' pointing clearly to * Mas-
chera ' and * Mascherati,* possibly pronounced in dia-
lect by the Italian servants of the king.^ Thus there
is no doubt at all about the Italian origin of the
Masque. Marlowe puts these lines into the mouth of
Gaveston, when that favourite looks forward to his life
at Court :

I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits.
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please :
Music and poetry is his delight ;
Therefore I '11 have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows ;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad.
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad ;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns.
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay.

The point is so clear, and at the same time so im-
portant for the comprehension of the subject, that a
digression on the Triumphs and Ballets of the Italians
may be allowed to serve as introduction to Ben Jonson,
Chapman, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Milton.

* Compare the Florentine Mandragola for Mandragora,

MASQUES AT ROME. 321

III.

The first great festival bearing on the history of
Masques in Italy, was that provided for Leonora of
Aragon, the daughter of King Ferdinand of Naples,
when she passed through Rome in 1474 to mate with
Ercole d' Este. A nephew of Pope Sixtus IV., the
Cardinal Pietro Riario, converted the Piazza de' Santi
Apostoli into a temporary palace for her use. The
square was roofed with curtains, and partitioned into
rooms communicating with the Cardinal's own resi-
dence. These were hung with tapestries of silk and
velvet, and furnished with the costliest utensils. The
servants of the Cardinal's household were dressed in
liveries of satin and embroidery. The seneschal
changed his costume four times in the course of the
banquets. Nymphs and centaurs, singers and buffoons,
drank wine from golden goblets at side tables. The
air was refreshed with perfumed fountains and cooled
by punkahs. Cooks and confectioners vied, one with
another, in producing fantastic dishes. It is recorded
that the histories of Perseus, Atalanta, and Hercules,
wrought in pastry, gilt and sugared, adorned the boards
at which the Papal, Royal, and Ducal guests assembled.
To entertain their eyes and ears, shows from classical
and Biblical history were provided, of which the
following extract from Corio will give sufficient details :
* After the banquet there came upon the dais some
eight men, with other eight attired like nymphs, who
were their loves. Among these came Hercules leading
his Deianira by the hand, Jason with Medea, Theseus

322 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

and Phaedra, each man accompanied by his mistress
and dressed according to their characters. When they
had all entered, fifes and many other instruments began
to sound, and they to dance and dally with their
nymphs ; in the which while leaped forth certain others
in the shape of Centaurs, bearing targets in the one
hand, and in the other clubs, who would have robbed
Hercules and his companions of their Nymphs. Thence
arose a combat between Hercules and the Centaurs, at
the end of which the hero drove them from the dais.
There was besides a representation of Bacchus and
Ariadne, with many other spectacles of the greatest
rarity and most inestimable cost.* These shows in
Rome, when a Cardinal, the favourite and nephew of a
Pope, turned his palace and the adjacent piazza into a
scene of revel for the entertainment of a royal bride,
marked an epoch in the evolution of the Masque. But
the echo of those picturesque rejoicings sounds too faintly
across four centuries to captivate the ears of our ima-
gination. We only gather from the notices of Italian
annalists that artistic genius played its part upon that
transitory stage in the Eternal City.

The Venetian Diary of Sanudo gives a detailed
history of the festivities which followed the marriage of
Lucrezia Borgia to Alfonso d' Este at Ferrara in 1502.
The chief feature in the entertainments was the recita-
tion of five plays of Plautus in Latin upon five suc-
cessive nights. These gems of classical literature
were set in a rich framework of Renaissance arabesque ;
masques and ballets being interpolated between each
• scene. It is noticeable that the name Moresco, whence
our Morris-dance, was already used for these interludes.

MASQUES AT FERRARA. 323

They were throughout accompanied by music. One
hundred and ten actors formed the troop, who, on the
first night, saluted the Ducal party in their dresses of
taifety and camlet, cut after the Moorish fashion. It
will suffice to indicate the motives of the rarer or more
striking dances. On one occasion ten men appeared
upon the stage, with long hair, in flesh-coloured tights, to
represent nudity. Each held a cornucopia, containing
four torches filled with turpentine, which flamed. A
damsel went before them in alarm, pursued by a dragon.
The dragon was vanquished and driven off" the stage
by a knight His squire caught up the damsel, and
the whole troop moved away, surrounded by the
salvage men shaking flames from their torches. The
next ballet was of maniacs, who danced with frantic
gestures. On another evening there appeared a Masque
of Cupid, who shot arrows and sang madrigals. He
was attended by ten actors cased in tin and covered
with lighted candles ; they carried looking-glasses on
their heads, and in their hands were paper lanterns also
filled with tapers. Again, upon the fifth evening, six
men of the wild woods drew forth a globe upon the
stage, out of which, when it was opened, emerged
the four Cardinal Virtues, singing appropriate songs.
Ballets of armed men in the antique habit, of German
lansknechts, of Moors, of hunters, of husbandmen, of
goats, and of gladiators fighting with darts and daggers,
filled up other intervals in the Plautine comedies.

It is clear, from the foregoing summary, that the
shows at Ferrara in 1502 contained in embryo the
chief constituents of the Masque as it was after-
wards developed. The same may be said about the

Y 2

324 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

first exhibition of Bibbiena s * Calandria.' The poet,
Castiglione, has left an interesting account of this
performance, which took place at Urbino in 15 13.
The Comedy was divided into five acts. Consequently,
there were four interludes, here also called Moresche.
The first was on the tale of Jason, who yoked a couple
of fire-breathing bulls to his plough, and sowed the
dragon's teeth. Then from traps in the stage emerged
a double band of antique warriors, who danced a wild
Pyrrhic, and slew each other. The second was a
Masque of Venus, drawn along in her car by a couple
of doves, and surrounded by a bevy of Cupids tossing
flame from lighted tapers. They set fire to a door,
out of which there leaped eight gallant fellows, all in
flames, careering round the stage in a fantastic figure.
The third was a Masque of Neptune. His chariot
was drawn by sea-horses, with eight huge monsters of
the deep surrounding it and gambolling grotesquely to
the sound of music. The fourth was a Masque of
Juno, seated on a fiery car, drawn by peacocks. Her
attendants were birds of different sorts, eagles, ostriches,
sea-mews and party-coloured parrots. This oddly
selected troupe executed a sword-dance, says Cas-
tiglione, with indescribable, nay incredible, grace !
When the Comedy ended, Love entered and explained
the allegory of the interludes in a concluding epilogue.
The whole performance terminated with a piece of
concerted music from behind the scenes, ' the invisible
music of four viols, accompanying as many voices, who
sang, to a beautiful air, a stanza of invocation to
Love/

MASQUES AT URBINO, 325

IV.

The special point about these ballets at Urbino
was the introduction of chariots, which gave a pro-
cessional character to the Masques, and made them
equivalent to Triumphs. Each interlude had its Car,
attended by a choir of dancers. To enlarge upon the
Carri and Trionfi of Florentine Carnivals during the
Medicean rule, is hardly necessary. I have already
elsewhere copiously illustrated them ; and those who
are curious in such matters, may study Signorelli's
Triumph of Cupid, or old engravings of Petrarch's
Trionfi, in order to obtain some notion of their arrange-
ment. Yet it is worth alluding here to the Triumph
of Bacchus and Ariadne designed by Lorenzo the
Magnificent about the year 1485 ; to the Triumph of
Death devised by Piero di Cosimo in 1 5 1 2 ; and to
the Pageant of the Golden Age which greeted Leo X.
in 1 5 1 3.^ These processional shows exercised a distinct
influence over the form assumed by the Masque. No-
where did they take richer and more complicated
shapes of beauty than in Florence. The inventions
ascribed by Vasari to Filippo Brunelleschi, by means
of which vast aureoles were raised aloft into the air,
with saints and goddesses enthroned amid cherubic
creatures, clouds and candles, must also be reckoned
among the most important contributions to the appa-
ratus of the Masque.^ The Florentines called them
Ingegni, and we find them largely used in London
under the Italian influence of Inigo Jones. The rare

* Renaissance in Italy ^ vol. iv. pp. 389-398. ^ Ibid, p. 318.

326 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

artistic genius of the Florentines amused itself on all
occasions with such shows ; combining architecture,
sculpture, painting, and music, with tableaux expressed
by living actors. Thus Vasari, in his life of Francesco
Rustici, describes the recreations of a private club of
artists, called the Compagnia della Cazzuola. Once a
year they met for a sumptuous banquet, which was
followed by a Comedy and Masque. Phineus and the
Harpies ; the dispute of theologians upon the Trinity,
with an incomparable heaven of angels ; Tantalus in
hell ; Mars, surrounded with mangled human limbs ;
Mars and Venus, caught naked in the net by Vulcan
and exposed to the laughter of all the gods ; were
among the motives of these bizarre entertainments,
each worked out with varied and capricious inventions
of gardens, wildernesses, fireworks, monsters, emble-
matical figures and allegories.

The climax of Florentine ingenuity in the produc-
tion of costly and artistic spectacles was reached in two
entertainments designed to celebrate the two weddings
of Francesco dei Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Of each of these we possess the fullest possible accounts,
written by contemporaries with a wealth of detail which
enables the historian to view them once again in the
pallid light of the imagination.^ In the year 15 15
Francesco married his first wife, Joan of Austria.
After making a triumphal entry into Florence, the
Queen, as she is always styled, was conducted to the
palace on the Ducal Square. The hall, constructed
for the meetings of the Great Council in the days of the

' See Descrisione delP Entrata^ del Convito Reale, e del Canto d^
Sogni, Firenze. Giunti, 1 566, Feste nelle Nostzcy &c. Giunti, 1 579.

MASQUES AT FLORENCE. 327

Republic, had been turned into a theatre. At one end was
the stage, concealed from view by a drop-scene painted
with a hunt. In front of this stage were seats provided
for the gentlemen of the Court and city. Further back,
on a raised dais, covered with the finest carpets, stood
the thrones of the princely couple, with chairs for
ambassadors and German nobles of the Queen's retinue.
Behind, and on a higher plane, swept a semicircular
tribune in six tiers. This was filled with noble ladies,
whose dresses of a hundred hues and sparkling jewels
blent with the sober tones of frescoes on the walls
around them. The hall was lighted by candles set on
branches issuing from masks, and so arranged as to
present the figures of Imperial, Papal, Royal, and
Grand-Ducal crowns — alluding to three Emperors
of the Austrian Dynasty, three Medicean Pontiffs, a
Queen whom the Medici had given to France, and the
five Dukes of their line who had reigned in Italy.
Overhead, ran the level Florentine ceiling, carved out
of solid oak, embossed with armorial emblems, heavy
with gold, rich with vermilion and ultramarine. It
seemed impossible that the stage should rival or surpass
the hall in radiance of effect. When the curtain rose,
the scene represented the Piazza of Sta. Trinitk in
Florence, viewed in perspective through a triumphal
arch flanked by the river-gods of Danube and Arno.
Giorgio Vasari was responsible for these decorations,
and for the engines which now introduced the Masque.
That, together with the play embedded in it after the
Italian fashion, had been arranged from the Myth of
Psyche, by Messer Giovambattista Cini. Out of a
heaven of clouds, which opened to the sound of music,

328 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Venus appeared in her gilded chariot drawn by swans.
Three Graces, naked save for their veils of yellow
hair, were grouped around her. The Four Seasons
appropriately clad, with wings of butterflies upon their
shoulders (as Raphael has imaged forth the Hours
in his Farnesina frescoes), followed in her train.
While they descended to the stage, Cupid issued
from the background. He was naked, as the poets
have described him ; and his wide wings fluttered in
the wind of perfumes. Hope and Fear and Grief and
Gladness bore his bow and quiver, net and torches,
scattering inextinguishable flame. Thus the Masque
began. To follow it through all its scenes would weary
curiosity. Else I might tell how all the Legend of Psyche
was set forth ; how pleasant groves appeared ; how
Hades threw wide his iron portals, and the three-headed
Cerberus howled, and the Furies shook their twisted
whips ; and how the show was closed with Hymen on
the summit of the Heliconian Mount.

This Comedy of * Psyche' was recited at Florence on
S. Stephen's Day. On the second of February in the
same winter, a second Masque of even greater rarity
and beauty was exhibited. It is called ' II Canto de'
Sogni,' or the Music-Masque of Dreams. * The soul or
conceit of the Masque,' as our ancestors would have
expressed it, was both subtle and imaginative. The
poet conceived all human life, with its various passions,
accidents, and humours, as a Dream, beneath the empire
of the great god Morpheus. Love, Beauty, Glory,
Wealth, Ambition, Madness passed before his vision
as the shapes which vex a sick man's slumbers. And,
as he viewed them, so he brought them on the stage,

MASQUES OF DREAMS, 329

making the pomp of that arch-ducal theatre subserve
the lesson that :

We are such stuff
As dreams are made of ; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The thought was ingenious. The execution was
gorgeous and varied beyond all power of description.
One hundred and sixty-eight performers took part in
the Masque ; some on horseback, and some seated in
cars. It was set forth in a series of processions ; a central
chariot in each division of the show being designed
with appropriate emblems and paintings, crowded
with figures picturesquely grouped together, attended
by outriders, and accompanied by the performers of
concerted music. Love, Fame, Plutus, Bellona, and
Madness, surrounded by their several genii and minis-
ters, sat enthroned upon the chariots. Their qualities
were indicated by marked and unmistakable allegory.
All the personages who composed their several trains,
however else they may have been attired, wore bat s
wings on their shoulders ; to symbolise the dreams
that fly abroad through brains of sleeping folk by
night. The Triumph of Love displayed the usual
myths of Hope and Fear ; but the car was followed
by a band, which detached itself in quaintness from
the common elements of Masquerade. The leader
of this band was Narcissus, dressed in blue velvet
embroidered with the flowers that bear his name.
The beautiful young men who waited on him, called
t belli, wore doublets of silver tissue worked with all
the blossoms of the spring, and breeches of blue
velvet sewn in gold and silver with narcissus flowers.

330 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

When Madness appeared, her company were Bac-
chantes and Satyrs, pair by pair, twined with ivy
and vine branches. The whole procession moved
across the scene in studied groups, preceded and di-
vided from each other by detached allegories — Mercury
and Diana, Witches and Priestesses, Phantasy and
Silence, Night and Dawning. Classical mythology
was racked to furnish forth the several emblems of these
personifications — their attendant beasts of elephants
and dolphins, tortoises and tigers, unicorns and falcons.
Blooming youth and wrinkled age, the grisly ugliness
of witches and the lucid beauty of Olympian gods,
human forms and bestial monsters, were blent together,
interchanged, contrasted and combined in the slow-
moving panorama.

When the Duke of Florence made his second
marriage with Bianca Capello in 1 5 79, these Triumphs
were repeated on a scale of similar magnificence, and in
very much the same artistic fashion. The descriptive
work published upon that occasion is valuable, since it
is illustrated with engravings in outline, which, though
they do no more than suggest the leading motives of
the shows, enable us to form some conception of their
general effect. We learn how the high-piled chariots
were adorned with statues, set with flaming cressets,
and drawn by birds or beasts ; how the allegorical
personages towered on high above them, grouped with
subordinate genii. Monsters of the deep wallow-
ing in mimic oceans, huge sea-shouldering whales,
Tritons blowing horns, gilded conchs crowded with
naked nymphs and Cupids waving torches, a vast four-
headed dragon vomiting flames, a galley preceded by

HENRI III. AT VENICE. 331

sea-horses, seem to have formed the main attractions of
this entertainment. By what means these bulky erec-
tions moved along upon their gilded wheels, does not
appear. But Florence, from of old, was well furnished
with mechanical contrivances ; and the artistic genius of
the people enabled them to conceal what must have
been grotesque in presentation, under forms of ever
fresh invention.

Before quitting Italy for the grey metropolis of the
North, with its clouded skies and colder festivals, let
us shift the scenes from Florence to Venice, and see
what the Republic of S. Mark could furnish, when her
Doge and Senators gave entertainment to a king.
Henry, Duke of Anjou, was the last male scion of the
House of Valois, by Henry the Second's marriage with
Caterina de* Medici, the daughter of Lorenzo, Duke of
Urbino. During early manhood this prince had distin-
guished himself in the Huguenot wars, and had been
elected King of Poland. The death of his brother,
Charles IX., made him King of France. In 1574 he
was hastening from Warsaw back to his ancestral
throne — back to the French palace, where a monk's
knife was destined, after a few years, to terminate the
craziest career which ever closed a brilliant dynasty in
sanguine gloom. At this moment fortune seemed to
smile upon his youth and twofold crown. Cynical phy-
siognomists might perhaps have cast no favourable
horoscope for the slim and delicate young man, of pale
complexion, with a few black hairs upon the sallow
chin, who stepped from his carriage at Malghera on to

332 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

the shores of the lagoon. But sixty Senators of Venice,
arrayed in crimson, at the place of embarkation,
thought less of Henry's tarnished character and
dubious blood than of the fact that he was King of
Poland, King of France, Italian by his mother, and
now guest of the Republic. Cap in hand, they at-
tended him to his state-barge.^ There they divided
his followers between them, and embarked upon their
several galleys. The splendid flotilla, on an afternoon
of July, spread canopies of silks and satins on the
mirror of that waveless lake. Saluted by the roar of
cannon from the islands, this noble convoy oared its
passage to Murano. There the palace of Barto-
lommeo Capello had been hung with cloth of gold
and embossed leather to receive the King. Sixty
halberdiers, attired in the French colours of orange
slashed with blue, were drawn up at the water stair-
case. Eighteen trumpeters and twelve drummers, in
the same livery, sounded a military welcome. Fort)'^
of the noblest youths of Venice, habited in doublets of
shot silk, attended as a royal body-guard. The King
passed through this gorgeous train ; his sober suit
of mourning and the pale face above the ruffles
round his neck showing dark against that painted
background. That night he spent upon the island.
Next day, the Doge and all the State of Venice
waited on him with a galley manned by four hundred
oarsmen, dressed in the colours of the House of
France. High on the poop, beneath a canopy of cloth
of gold, he took his station. At his right hand sat

' There is a picture of mediocre performance in Uie Ducal Palace
representing this embarkation at Malghera.

PROCESSION TO THE LIDO. 333

the Dukes of Mantua, Nevers, Ferrara, and the Car-
dinal Legate of San Sisto. At his left, the Doge
and the Ambassadors. Fourteen galleys followed
with the Senators of Venice, trailing their robes of
purple silk on Oriental carpets. The aristocracy and
gentry of Venice brought up the rear, lashing the
waters with the oars of a thousand glittering gondolas.
Through the summer afternoon they swept, round
San Pietro di Castello to Sant* Elena, and from Sant*
Elena to San Niccolo on Lido. At every point the
guns from battlement and bastion thundered salutes,
and the church towers showered their tocsins on the
startled air. Between Venice and Lido the lagoon
swarmed with boats. The whole city seemed to be
afloat that day. Each of the great Guilds had mounted
a brigantine with emblematic pomp and quaint mag-
nificence. That of the Silk- weavers was one heaven-
pointing pyramid of costly stuffs and banners waving
to the wind ; that of the Goldsmiths glittered with
chased plate and jewels ; that of the Mercers, manned
by a crew in purple and yellow liveries, burned like a
pyre of crimson cloth upon the waves ; the Mirror-
makers hung their masts and gunwale thick with
glasses, which flashed back sunlight, as the galley
moved, in dazzling lightnings ; the Swordsmiths
bristled at every point with arms and instruments of
war. Upon each of these brigantines and on the
gondolas around them were stationed players upon
instruments of music, trumpeters and drummers and
blowers of the Turkish horn, whose wild barbaric din
commingled with the rush of oars and the roar of that
vast multitude.

334 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

So the procession swept away toward Lido, where
the art of Venice was to add a crowning consecration
to this pomp. On the shore Palladio had built an
arch of triumph leading to a temple. Tintoretto,
Paolo Veronese, and Antonio Aliense, the three
famous painters of the day, had lavished on this ephe-
meral masterpiece their matchless colours married to
august design. The Patriarch of Venice waited at
the temple porch to greet the King of France, who,
after praying at the altar, was conducted once more to
the sea. This time he entered the state-barge of the
Republic.^ The Bucentaur conducted him from Lido,
past the Riva, past San Giorgio, past the Ducal
Palace, past the Campanile, down the Grand Canal.
It was late in the evening when he reached the
Palazzo Foscari, which, together with adjacent
houses of the Giustiniani, had been placed at his dis-
posal. The cosdiest tapestries, embroideries of silk
and satin, hangings of velvet and stamped leather,
draped the chambers, which were filled with choicest
furniture and pictures. A table was daily spread there
for five hundred persons. Every night the palaces were
illuminated with lamps and torches ; and every night
the waterways beneath resounded to the strains of
singing choirs and stringed orchestras. Regattas, mock-
fights between the Nicolotti and Castellani, banquets
in the Great Hall of the Ducal Palace, visits to the
Arsenal, visits to the Fuggers of Augsburg in the Fon-
daco dei Tedeschi, visits to the glass-works, a musical
drama in the Palace, a dress ball in the room where

* It is said that Tintoretto contrived to get on board the galley
disguised as a groom, and to make a portrait of the King in transit

HENRPS LIFE AT VENICE. 335

Tintoretto's ' Paradise ' now hangs, followed in be-
wildering succession. When Henry left his lodgings,
the Bucentaur transported him to the piazza. The
pavement was carpeted with crimson cloth ; the win-
dows hung with blue and orange draperies ; the capi-
tals and cornices festooned with laurel wreaths and
ivy. At the entrance of the Sala del Gran Consiglio,
two hundred ladies of the Golden Book stood waiting
for him in their white silk robes of state, with ropes
of pearls around their throats and twisted in their
yellow hair.^ Venice, through those days of festival,
exhibited the scene of one vast Masque — the most
imperially mounted and played on the most splendid
theatre that earth can show. It is satisfactory to read
that Henry, in the midst of all this regal pomp and
official parade, found time to enjoy the pleasures
which the city offers to more ordinary mortals. At-
tended by one or another of the forty noble youths
who kept him company, he disguised himself and took
the humours of the town, buying a jewelled sceptre in
one shop of the Rialto, and sighing at the feet of an
accomplished courtesan, the famous Veronica Franco.
Michelet is, perhaps, justified in saying that the last
Valois left in Venice such remnants of virility as he
brought with him from Poland. On his return to
France, Henry affected the habits and costume of a
woman, and sacrificed his kingdom's interests to the
detested Epernon. Fifteen years of civil warfare,
ruined finances, unpopularity, bad health, and eccentric
pleasures, diversified by the melodramatic murder of

' As we may see them painted by Gentile Bellini in his picture of
the Miracle of Santa Croce.

336 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

the Guise in his own bedroom, brought this hero of
the Venetian Masque to death by the hand of an
assassin at Saint Cloud.

VI.

Transported from Italy to England, the Masque, as
will be readily imagined, was shorn of much of its artistic
splendour. The Courts of Henry and Elizabeth could
boast no architects like Giorgio Vasari and Palladio, no
painters like Pontormo and Bronzino, Tintoret and
Veronese. English music had not reached the perfec-
tion of Italian art, either in the excellence of stringed
instruments or the practised skill of vocalists. Instead
of the Cars and Triumphs of Florentine Carnivals, in lieu
of the Processions of S. John*s Day, and the Venetian
festivals of Marriage with the Adriatic, the traditions
of scenical parade in England were restricted to City
Pageants and the shows of Miracle plays, mummings
at Christmas and disguisings at Shrovetide. Climate,
scenery, and architecture were alike less favourable to
theatrical display upon the banks of the Thames than
on the shores of A mo or the waves of the Lagoons.
It must further be observed that the Italian artists who
visited our island, whether sculptors or painters, archi-
tects or musicians, were men of the second or third rank.
Those only who found no employment at home, or who
had special reasons for abandoning their country, exiled
themselves to England. In this respect, the English
Court was even less fortunate than the French. Cellini
and Andrea del Sarto, Primaticcio and Rosso, settled
for a time in Paris ; Lionardo da Vinci died at Amboise.

MASQUES IN ENGLAND. 337

But Torrigiani was the most notable Italian who took
up his abode in London.

Under these conditions, the Masque received no
adequate treatment in England during the reigns of our
Tudor sovereigns. Elizabeth was too economical to
spend the large sums requisite for a really magnificent
Masque at Court, when a simple play could be acted at
so much less expense. On one occasion, indeed, she
sent a sumptuous embassy of Masquers from London to
Edinburgh, as a compliment to James on his accession
to the throne of Scotland. Nor was she displeased by
the costly pageants prepared for her amusement at
Kenilworth. But the sums which a subject and a
favourite, like Leicester, could afford for his sovereign s
entertainment, the Queen herself was unwilling to
expend upon the ordinary pleasures of the Court.

The accession of James I. marked an epoch in the
development of the Masque. This king and his son
Charles I. were both of them inordinately fond of
pageants, and willing to disburse considerable sums of
money yearly on such trifles. Whitehall, during these
reigns, vied with the Ducal Palaces of Florence, Urbino,
and Ferrara, in the pomp and beauty of its Masques.
The Drama had attained full growth ; and what the
English Masque might still lack upon the side of pictorial
art, was fully compensated by poetical invention. The
distinctive features of the Masque in Italy, as we have
seen, were these. It had been used either as a kind of
ballet-interlude, to relieve the graver attractions of a
formal comedy, or it had assimilated the type of pro-
cessional pageantry upon occasions of public rejoicing.
In neither case had the poet played a very prominent

'..

338 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

part in its production. To raise the libretto to the
dignity of literature, to compose words for Masques
which should retain substantial value as poetry, was
reserved for playwrights of our race. The English
Masque was characterised by dramatic movement and
lyrical loveliness, far superior to anything of the kind
which had appeared in Italy. In the hands of Ben
Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas
Hey wood, and George Chapman, it assumed a new
form, consonant with the marked bias of the national
genius at that epoch to the theatre. The Masques of
these eminent poets can still be read with satisfaction.
They appeal to our literary sense by the beauty of their
songs and by the ingenuity of their dramatic motives-

VII.

Two great artists combined to fix the type of the
English Masque. These were Ben Jonson, who applied
his vast erudition, knowledge of theatrical effect, and
vein of lyric inspiration to the libretto ; and Inigo
Jones, the disciple of Palladio and architect of White-
hall, who contributed the mechanism and stage scenery
needed for bodying forth the poets fancy to the eye.
They were assisted by an Italian composer, Alfonso
Ferrabosco, who wrote the music ; and by an English
choreograph, Thomas Giles, who arranged the dances
and decided the costumes. The Court establishment
of musicians at this epoch numbered some fifty-eight
persons, twelve of whom were certainly Italians.
Mon^y was not spared either by the Royal Family or
by the courtiers on these ceremonial occasions. At

COST OF MASQUES, 339

Christmas and Shrovetide it was customary for the

King and the Queen, each of them, to present a

Masque. The Inns of Court vied in prodigality with

the Crown, when circumstances prompted them to a

magnificent display. Noblemen, again, were in the

habit of subscribing at their own expense to furnish

forth a complimentary pageant on the occasion of a

distinguished marriage or the arrival of illustrious

guests in England.

The payments made for the Queen's Masque at

Christmas 1610-11 enable us to estimate the cost of

these performances in detail. The total amounted to

720/. ; of which Jonson and Inigo Jones received 40/.

apiece, the ballet-master 50/., and five boy-actors 2/.

each. When the * H ue and Cry after Cupid ' was

presented at the wedding of Lord Haddington in

1608 by twelve English and Scottish lords, it was

computed that this would stand them in about 300/. a

man. Chapman's * Memorable Masque,' played at

Whitehall in 161 3, by the Middle Temple and

Lincoln's Inn, cost the latter Society alone upwards of

1,000/. Jonson's ' Masque of Blackness ' in 1609, cost

the Court 3,000/. ; Daniel's * Masque of Tethys ' in

161 1, may be reckoned at 1,600/. ; Jonson's * Oberon '

in 161 1, at 1,000/.; Daniel's * Hymen's Triumph ' in

161 3, at 3,000/. ; the Queen's Masque in 1637, at

1,550/. * The Triumph of Peace,' designed by

Shirley and Inigo Jones, and presented by the Inns of

Court in procession to Whitehall in 1634, was one of

the most expensive and magnificent, i ,000/. was spent

on music alone ; and on the costumes of the horsemen

the vast sum of io,ood/. The total paid by the Inns on

z 2

340 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

this occasion was estimated at over 20,000/. Having
a fixed musical establishment, which even in the time
of Elizabeth cost over 600/. a year in salaries, the
Court was able to mount a Masque at a somewhat
cheaper rate than private adventurers, such as com-
panies of noblemen or Gentlemen of Lincoln's Inn.
The average disbursements during the reigns of the
first Stuarts may be estimated at about 1,400/. for
each Masque. Of this, perhaps 400/. was spent on
dresses, and 1,000/. on the apparatus. When we take
into account the difference between the value of money
at that time and this, and multiply in round numbers
by four, we obtain very considerable amounts ex-
pended by the Court and gentlemen of England upon
pageantry.

VIII.

It was part of the poets duty to prepare for pub-
lication a detailed account of the whole Masque ; de-
scribing the scenes, costumes, and dances ; introducing
the libretto he had written for the actors, and paying
tribute to his several collaborators. The names of the
principal performers, if they were royal or noble
persons, were printed in their proper places. The little
book, we may imagine, was prized as a souvenir by
those who had taken part in so august and so ephemeral
a pageant. It also found numerous purchasers among
those who had assisted at the representation, or such
as were curious to read of what they had not been for-
tunate enough to witness. A solemn Masque at Court
was an event of public importance. Grave personages,
like Sir Francis Bacon, took interest in the arrange-

LIBRETTL 341

ment of the shows ; and all the town was eager to be
present at their exhibition. Bacon, it will be remem-
bered, wrote an essay upon Masques, which, coming
from his pen, is curious, though it furnishes but little
useful information. He also accepted Beaumont's
dedication of the ' Masque of Thamesis and Rhine,'
of which he himself is said to have been ' the chief
contriver.'

To this custom of printing the description of
Court Masques, we owe the preservation of more than
thirty pieces by Ben Jonson, not to mention those of
Marston, Beaumont, Heywood, Chapman, Daniel,
Campion, Ford, Shirley, and other poets of less note.
All these were composed after James's accession to the
throne of England, at which time Jonson's connection
with the Court and aristocracy commenced. From
that date forward, he preferred this form of invention
to play- writing. No wedding or tilting match, no
reception of a foreign prince, or Shrovetide festival,
was considered perfect without something from the
Laureate's pen.

Jonson threw his whole spirit into the work. His
Masques are not only infinitely varied, witty, tasteful,
and ingenious ; but vast erudition is exhibited in the
notes with which the poet has enriched them. The
' Masque of Queens,' for example, contains a well-
digested and exhaustive dissertation upon witchcraft in
antiquity. Jonson chafed at the precedence in popular
esteem which was very naturally given to the architect,
scene-painter, and ballet-master, upon these occasions.
He thought that the poet, whose invention was the
soul of such splendid trifles, deserved the lion's share

342 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

of fame. And certainly, were it not for Jonson's
lyrics, we should pay them slight attention now. In
his prefaces he was, however, careful to assign what
he considered their due share of credit to his several
collaborators. Having described the landscape scene
devised for his * Masque of Blackness ' in long and
detailed paragraphs, he adds : * So much for the bodily
part, which was of Master Inigo Jones's design and
act' Again, in the Masque of Queens he says :
' The device of their attire was Master Jones's, with
the invention and architecture of the whole scene and
machine.' The master of the dances, Thomas Giles ;
the composer of the music, * my excellent friend,
Alfonso Ferrabosco ; ' and the principal soloist, * that
most excellent tenor voice and exact singer, her
Majesty's servant. Master John Allin;' received com-
pliments upon appropriate occasions. But the poet
always reserved for himself the chief honours of each
piece. His lofty introduction to the * Hymenaei ' opens
thus : ' It is a noble and just advantage that the things
subjected to understanding have of those which are
objected to sense ; that the one sort are but moment-
ary, and merely taking ; the other impressing and
lasting : else the glory of all these solemnities had
perished like a blaze, and gone out, in the beholders'
eyes. So short-lived are the bodies of all things, in
comparison of their souls.'

Master Inigo Jones was no less imperious and in-
tolerant of rivalry than Master Benjamin Jonson. Heby
no means relished this assignment of the merely bodily
and transient part to him, whereas the poet claimed an
immortality of art and learning. ' Well-languaged

JONSON AND JONES, 343

Daniel ' showed him properer respect. * In these things/
runs the preface to the ' Masque of Tethys/ * wherein
the only life consists in show, the art and invention of
the architect gives the greatest grace, and is of the
most importance, ours (i.e. the poet's) ' the least part,
and of least note in the time of the performance there-
of.' Chapman, Jonson's rival in poetry and erudition,
placed his own name below Jones's on the title-page
of their ' Memorable Masque,' adding : * Invented and
fashioned, with the ground and special structure of the
whole work, by our kingdom's most artful and ingenious
Architect, Inigo Jones ; supplied, applied, digested, and
written by George Chapman.' Thus both Daniel and
Chapman acknowledged themselves to be the mere ex-
positors in words of the great builder's thought ; while
Jonson treated the builder as the lackey waiting on his
Muse. They humbly regarded their own work as the
necessary illustration of fair spectacles which passed
away and were forgotten with the pleasure they
afforded. He proudly expected the suffrage of pos-
terity, when all the torches of Whitehall should be
extinguished, the royal actors dead and buried, the
groves and cars and temples of the mechanician turned
to dust. In this clash of opinions, Jonson, conscious
of his own poetical achievement, was indubitably right.
Had Inigo Jones left us no Banqueting Hall to
grace the shore of Thames, his fame would now have
vanished with the fairy world evoked by him on winter
nights * upon that memorable scene.' But even if
the Tragedies and Comedies and Underwoods had
perished, Jonson would still occupy an honourable
place among our poets on the strength of his Masques,

344 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Entertainments, Barriers, and Marriage Triumphs
alone. So true is it that while the present life of such
things throbbed An their bodily presentment to the
senses, their indestructible soul was in the poet's
words.

Discord ensued between these two irascible artists,
whom we must regard as the main founders and
supporters of the Masque in England. Jones managed
to supplant Jonson in the favour of the Court. Jonson
retaliated by sneering at the architect s * twice-con-
ceived, thrice-paid-for imagery,* and by lampooning
him in a comedy. The ' Tale of a Tub ' originally
contained a satirical portrait of Inigo Jones under the
name of Vitruvius Hoop. This part was struck out by
the Master of the Revels ; ' exception being taken
against it by the Surveyor of the King's Works, as a
personal injury to him.'

IX.

Too much time has been spent, perhaps, upon the
history of this insignificant and uninteresting quarrel
between Jones and Jonson. It serves, however, to
explain the conditions under which Masques were pro-
duced at Court, and the state of contemporary opinion
on this topic. Before proceeding to survey the work
of Jonson, I must repeat that the Masque itself was
presented by royal and noble personages. On their
performances the architect lavished his costliest inven-
tions. But this magnificence required some foil. An
Antimasque was consequently furnished ; and for this,
some grotesque or comic motive had to be selected.

MASQUE AND ANTIMASQUE. 345

For the Antimasque, actors from the public theatres
were hired. We consequently find that, while the
Masque assumes the form of a Triumph or Ballet,
the Antimasque is more strictly and energetically
dramatic. The latter gave scope to dialogue and
action ; the former to processions, dances, and accom-
paniments of music. In the Antimasque, Hecate
led the revels of witches round her cauldron. In the
Masque, queens attended Anne of Denmark in her
passage across the stage, on chariots of gold and jewels ;
lutes and viols sounded ; Prince Henry and Duke
Charles stepped the high measures of the galliard or
coranto. To combine the contrasted motives of the
Masque and Antimasque into one coherent scheme,
was the poet's pride. And it is just here that Jonson
showed his mastery. The antithesis of scenical effect
enlivened the whole exhibition, and enabled him to
vary his caprices.

At the same time Jonson's robust and logical intel-
lect saved him from merely setting one show against
another. There is always method in the madness of
his fancy, which makes some of his Masques true
gems of solid and ingenious workmanship. It may be
parenthetically noticed that this antithesis survives in
the Italian Ballo and the English pantomime of the
present day. The latter may, indeed, be fairly re-
garded as a lineal descendant from the Masque, with
additions from the Ballo and clown's jig of our an-
cestors.

346 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

The very names of Jonson's Masques reveal their
strangeness and variety. There is a Masque of Black-
ness, answered by a Masque of Beauty ; a Welsh
Masque, and an Irish Masque ; a Masque of Queens,
and a Masque of Owls ; a Masque of Christmas, and
a Masque of Lethe ; a Masque of Augurs, and a
Masque of Time. Neptune and Love had each his
Triumph. Pan gave his title to a pastoral Masque,
and Hymen to a Masque of Marriage. In one
extravaganza of the poet*s fancy the Golden Age was
restored to earth ; in another the Fortunate Isles
were visited ; a third revealed the wonders of a
world discovered in the moon ; a fourth was called
* The Vision of Delight.' Sometimes this capricious
Muse assumes a loftier tone, and rescues Love from
Ignorance and Folly, or reconciles the wanton boy
with Virtue. Sometimes she stoops to rustic mirth ;
camps with gipsies on their roadside bivouac ; dances
with woodland nymphs and shepherds round Pan's
altar ; sports with young Satyrs in the brake ; or leads
the fairies in a ring round Oberon their prince. Some-
times she dons Bellona's casque of war, and sounds
the clarion for tilts and barriers. But when her
mood is serious, the Antimasque is sure to raise a
smile; and when she deigns to wanton, the scene is
closed with ceremonious hymns and compliments to
Majesty.

These Masques, in the perusal, stripped of their

VARIETY OF JONSON'S MASQUES. 347

* apparelling/ as Jonson aptly styled the apparatus,
make severe demands on the imagination. It is still
possible, however, to read them with pleasure ; espe-
cially if the student brings a scholar's memory to the
task. He will wonder at the fullness and extent of
learning employed on these fantastic toys, no less than
at the ease with which the poet moves beneath its
ponderous weight. Jonson is nowhere seen to more
advantage than when he reproduces erudition in some
form of lyric beauty. His best song, ' Drink to me
only with thine eyes,* is a close paraphrase from
Philostratus ; yet who can deny the delicacy of its
beauty, or the originality which places it in the first
rank of English lyrics ? The same faculty for alche-
mising a scholar's knowledge into poetry is displayed
at large in the Antimasque of Witches ; * Macbeth ' sug-
gested the motive, and the whole range of classical
literature furnished the details. But the motive is
handled in a style so masterly, and the details are
applied with such artistic freedom, that we rise from
the perusal of those wild incantation scenes with a keen
sense only of the poet's command of weird and ghasdy
imagery. The Masque of Hymen combines the eru-
dition of Roman bridals with the epithalamial hymns
of Catullus, in choruses and scenes and speeches of
' linked sweetness long drawn out.' * The Masque of
Augurs ' converts the pious rites of ancient Rome into
a modern pageant. The * Hue and Cry after Cupid'
dramatises an Idyll of Moschus in verse that has the
sharp-cut clearness of a Greek intaglio. The induc-
tion to ' Neptune's Triumph ' turns several fragments
from the Attic playwrights to account in a controversy

348 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

between the poet and the cook upon their several
arts. ' The Masque of Oberon ' is introduced by a dia-
logue of Satyrs, Sylvans, and Silenus, starting from
Virgil's sixth Eclogue, and interweaving the mythology
of Pan and Bacchus with that of Northern fairyland in
a work of chastened art which can be only paralleled
from Landor's poetry.

Such are the dainty delights which Jonson, 'at his
full tables/ has provided for the lover of literature.
It is true that a scholars appetite must be brought to
the repast ; else some * fastidious stomachs,' as he
phrases it, may prefer to * enjoy at home their clean
empty trenchers/ But no one who has a true sense of
verse will fail to be rewarded by a cursory perusal of
those lyrics, upon which even Milton deigned to found
his pastoral style. In support of this somewhat bold
assertion, I must beg my reader's leave to go astray
awhile at random through these paths of poetry.
Imagine, then, that Venus has descended with her
Graces from the heavens. She complains that Cupid
has run away from home. None of the Graces know
what has become of him. Then his mother turns to
the ladies of the Court assembled in the hall before
her. Perhaps, the truant is hidden in their laps or
nestling in their bosoms. She bids the Graces cry
him. This they do in nine responsive stanzas :

Beauties, have you seen this toy.
Called Love, a little boy.
Almost naked, wanton, blind ;
Cruel now, and then as kind ?
If he be amongst ye, say I
He is Venus' runaway.

POETRY OF JONSON'S MASQUES. .349

So the one voice sings ; and a second voice takes up
the chaunt :

He hath marks about him plenty ;
You shall know him among twenty.
All his body is a fire,
And his breath a flame entire,
That, being shot, like lightning, in,
Wounds the heart, but not the skiiv

The Masque, from which I have borrowed these
two stanzas, concludes with an Epithalamion. It is
not equal to Spenser's sublime hymns in lyric rapture,
nor yet in warmth and wealth of imagery to Herrick's ;
but it is composed of stuff like this :

Love's commonwealth consists of toys ;
His council are those antic boys.

Games, Laughter, Sports, Delights,
That triumph with him on these nights :

To whom we must give way.
For now their reign begins, and lasts till day.

They sweeten Hymen's war,
And, in that jar.

Make all, that married be.
Perfection see.
Shine, Hesperus, shine forth, thou wishfed star !

On rare occasions, Jonson s lyric touch reminds us
of the style of very modern singers. Here is a stanza
from * The Fortunate Isles,* which has an air of
Wordsworth :

The winds are sweet, and gently blow ;
But Zephyrus, no breath they know,

The father of the flowers :
By him the virgin violets live,
And every plant doth odours give

As fresh as are the hours.

350 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

The complicated choric passages in this Masque,
written for three mens voices, with question and
answer, echo and antiphony, melting into harmony or
unison upon the close, must have been singularly sweet
to hear. But, alas ! their music, whether by Ferrabosco
or by Harry Lawes, is lost. We only know, through
Madrigals composed about that time by Gibbons, how
pure the outline of their cadence may have been.

XI.

Jonson, stout and rugged as he was undoubtedly,
Dryasdust as some conceive him, had yet an exquisite
sense of rural beauty. This he showed in the fine
fragment of his *Sad Shepherd.' But the Masques
abound in passages of no less delicacy. * Pan s Anni-
versary * opens with a trio of Nymphs, carrying prickles,
or open wicker baskets, and strewing several sorts of
flowers before the altar of the god. Each sings, as she
performs her task. The third carries a basket of violets,
which she showers upon the ground to these verses :

Drop, drop your violets ! Change your hues.

Now red, now pale, as lovers use !

And in your death go out as well

As when you lived, unto the smell !

That from your odour all may say :

This is the shepherd's holyday !

There is no crabbed erudition here ; but rather a
faint evanescent scent of Shelley s lines upon the violet.
When the Nymphs have done singing, an old Shepherd
addresses them :

PASTORAL MASQUES. 351

Well done, my pretty ones ! rain roses still,
Until the last be dropped : then hence, and fill
Your fragrant prickles for a second shower.
Bring corn-flag, tulips, and Adonis' flower,
Fair ox-eye, goldy-locks, and columbine.
Pinks, goulands, king-cups, and sweet sops-in-wine.
Blue harebells, pagles, pansies, calaminth.
Flower-gentle, and the fair-haired hyacinth ;
Bring rich carnations, flower-de-luces, lilies.
The checked, and purple-ringed daffodillies.
Bright crown imperial, king-spear, hollyhocks,
Sweet Venus-navel, and soft lady-smocks ;
Bring too some branches forth of Daphne's hair,
And gladdest myrtle for these posts to wear,
With spikenard weaved and marjoram between,
And starred with yellow-golds and meadows-queen.
That when the altar, as it ought, is dressed.
More odour come not from the phoenix nest,
The breath thereof Panchaia may envy.
The colours China, and the light the sky !

It may well be wondered, when the poet has sent
his Shepherd with this flourish off the stage, whether
he could himself have pointed out each herb amid that
prodigality of quaint-named blossoms in some actual
garden at one same and certain season of the year.
The effect, however, is rich ; and those who care to
reconstruct old English flower-beds in their imagina-
tion, may learn from Gerard s Herbal what goldy-
locks and goulands, sops-in-wine and pagles, lady-
smocks and calaminth and purple-ringed daffodillies
really were.

3$2 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

XII.

In the Masque of Beauty, Jonson sounds a higher
lyric note than this. To judge by the description he
has furnished of the show, the ' bodily presentment '
must have been magnificent and exquisite. Harmonia
was seated on a throne, adorned with painted statues,
and approached by six steps, which were * covered with
a multitude of Cupids (chosen out of the best and most
ingenious youths of the kingdom, both noble and
others) that were the torch -bearers.' Around the
throne were * curious and elegant arbours appointed.'
Behind it spread * a grove of grown trees laden with
golden fruit, which other little Cupids plucked, and
threw at each other, whilst on the ground leverets
picked up the bruised apples, and left them half eaten/
Into this pleasance, on a floating island, came the
Masquers ; and when they had * danced forth a most
curious dance, full of excellent device and change,'
they stood in the figure of a diamond, ' and so,
standing still, were by the musicians with a second
song, sung by a loud tenor, celebrated : *

So Beauty on the waters stood,
When Love had severed earth from flood !
So when he parted air from fire.
He did with concord all inspire !
And then a motion he them taught,
That elder than himself was thought ;
Which thought was, yet, the child of earth,
For Love is older than his birth.

In the libretto of * Prince Henry s Barriers,' Jonson
attacks history, and summons Merlin from his grave

HISTORICAL MASQUES, 353

within the lake to marshal forth the glories of
Plantagenets and Tudors. Henry, on the day pre-
ceding this trial of arms, had been created Prince of
Wales with extraordinary pomp. He was a youth
of singular beauty and athletic grace, an adept in
chivalrous sports, and a pursuivant of love, though
only in his fifteenth year. To greet him on this great
occasion with the muster-roll of England's potent
Edwards and heroic Henrys, was a compliment no less
instructive than effective. First come the builders-up
of English greatness ; then the Crusaders ; next the
Black Prince :

That Mars of men.
The black prince Edward, 'gainst the French who then
At Cressy field had no more years than you.

After him, the hero of Agincourt :

Yet rests the other thunderbolt of war,
Harry the Fifth, to whom in face you are
So like, as fate would have you so in worth.
Illustrious prince !

Lastly, Elizabeth, before whose auspices fled shattered
the Invincible Armada :

That covered all the main,
As if whole islands had broke loose, and swam,
Or half of Norway with her fir-trees came
To join the continent

The young prince, so lately consecrated heir of Eng-
land, must have had churls blood in his veins if he
blushed and thrilled not to the martial music of these
verses. He could not know to what a timeless death
his adolescence was devoted. Nor could any of the
Court then present have predicted how the splendours

A A

354 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

of the House of Stuart would be merged in two grim
revolutions. Strangely enough, as though the poet
were also prophet, Jonson reserves the last lines of his
panegyric for a princess of the Stuart line — Elizabeth,
the wife of the Elector Palatine, from whom the
Empress-Queen of England at our epoch draws her
blood. Of her he says :

She shall be
Mother of nations !

In this prediction lurks a deep poetic irony While
intending a compliment, the Laureate wrote a motto for
America and Canada, for Australia and New Zealand,
for the Colonies of Africa and China, for the South-Sea
Islands, and the Empire of the Eastern Indies.

Young Henry proved himself not unworthy of these
royal honours. Upon the morrow of the Masque, he
held the lists together with his chosen champions against
their chivalrous assailants. That day, he gave and
received thirty-two pushes of pikes, and about three
hundred and sixty strokes of swords. Allowing for the
fact that this was a toy-tournament, in which a Prince of
Wales was no doubt well regarded, we may still repeat
Sir George Cornwallis's comment on his prowess with
national pride : ' the which is scarce credible in so young
years, enough to assure the world that Great Britain's
brave Henry aspired to immortality.' On the evening
of the day following these Barriers, the Prince ap-
peared as Oberon among his fairies in a new and still
more splendid entertainment They danced until the
night was well-nigh spent, when Phosphor, rising,
bade them all, like duteous fays, speed home to bed :

PRINCE HENRY. 355

To rest, to rest ! The herald of the day,

Bright Phosphorus, commands you hence I Obey !

The moon is pale, and spent ; and winged night

Makes headlong haste to fly the morning's sight,

WTio now is rising from her blushing wars,

And with her rosy hand puts back the stars :

Of which myself the last, her harbinger,

But stay to warn you that you not defer

Your parting longer ! Then do I give way,

As Night hath done, and so must you, to Day.

This warning from the morning star may well be
taken as a warning for the modern scribe, sitting late
into the night with Jonson, who feels the exploration
of the beauties scattered through those Masques to be
an infinite quest.

XIIL

Thus far, I have confined attention to the scenic
splendour of our Masques ; to the flowers of lyric
poetry adorning them ; and to the deep subsoil of learn-
ing, from which those radiant blossoms sprang. But
there is a dark and ominous shadow cast by history
upon their brightness. The last word spoken must
concern the actors, must disclose the tragic irony of
their appearance on that courtly stage. Let us recall
the English beauties who attended Anne of Denmark
— Belanna, as her Laureate styled the Queen — in her
triumphal progress through the Masque of Beauty.
Countesses of Arundel and Derby, of Bedford and
Montgomery ; Ladies Guilford, Petre, Winsor, Winter,
Clifford, Neville, Hatton, Chichester, and Walsingham.
Many of these women had sad tales to tell in days of
coming troubles. But the saddest tale of all was that
of the Lady Arabella Stuart. Heiress of the House

A A 3

356 SHAKSPEI^E'S PREDECESSORS,

of Lennox, she was watched with jealousy alike by
Tudor and by Stuart sovereigns. To prevent her
marriage, was the policy of Scotch and English Courts.
Yet she held a dazzling place, so near the throne, in
both ; and love makes pastime for himself with cour-
tiers' hearts. Her intimacy with a cousin, Esme Stuart,
was forbidden. The suit of a Percy was frosted in
the bud. The King of France thought of her for a
moment, but rejected her * on better judgment making,'
as too distant from the crown of England. Then, it
seems, her feelings were engaged for William Seymour,
grandson of the Earl of Hertford. State interference
in this matter compromised her woman s fame. She
was imprisoned at Lambeth ; he was committed to the
Tower. They both escaped, and took their flight to
Flanders. But the Lady Arabella was captured at
Calais, and brought back to London. She had played
her part at Whitehall in the ' Masque of Beauty,' in
1608. She died in the Tower, a raving lunatic, in 1 615.
Turn to ' Prince Henry s Barriers,' and the Masque
of Oberon. In these, the heir apparent shone before
his people and the Court in 1610. He was a youth
heroic, beautiful, and brave, a nation's darling. From
her lethargy of age he roused the Dame of Chivalry,
brought Merlin from his grave, and unsphered Arthur
from the skies. The poet hailed him as a second
Harry, fit for Agincourt in form and feature. Scholars
dubbed him Moeliades, Lord of the Isles, and out of
this mysterious name made anagrams — A Deo M iles.
None then could know that he was the Marcellus of a
kingdom. But round him, as he danced among his
fairies, floated shades of Death and Hades.

TRAGIC IRONY OF WHITEHALL MASQUES, 357

Egregium forma juvenem et fulgentibus armis,
Sed frons laeta parum, et dejecto lumine vultus.

Scatter lilies and roses ! Henry will have died before
three years are over, and the poets will be shedding
tears for Moeliades in Hawthornden and London.

And the little Duke Charles, who danced so bravely
with the fairies in his brother s festival ; the Prince
Charles, who, when he came from Spain, led forth the
revels of * Time Vindicated ; ' what shall be said of him ?
The Princes Masque of 1623 was followed by a very
different pageant at Whitehall in 1649. And what had
passed between those dates — what death-throes of a
dynasty, divisions of a nation !

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try ;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right ;

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed

Pass, once again, to the Masque of Hymen.
Through those epithalamial hymns which sounded
in the ears of Essex and his bride in 16 16, who does
not hear the mutterings of destiny and dire disgrace ?
The Lady Frances Howard was in her fourteenth
year. The heir of Elizabeth's and the nation's darling,
the young Earl of Essex, was hardly fifteen. Jonson,
in his marriage chorus for these children, sang :

And wildest Cupid waking hovers
With adoration 'twixt the lovers.

The girl-wife lived to seek a dishonourable divorce,

358 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and to wed the Earl of Somerset, that Carr who made
his fortunate d^btit in James's favour on the morning of
' Prince Henry s Barriers/ Tried and condemned for
the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, the lives of this
guilty couple were spared by the King's terror of de-
tection. They ended their days in separation, the ob-
jects of universal horror. The boy-husband of Jonson s
hymeneal pageant was destined to lead the armies of
the Parliament against his sovereign, and to sink at
last before the power and popularity of Cromwell.

With the advance of years, the tragic irony of these
Masques at Court deepens. The last great entertain-
ment of this kind, of which we have any detailed in-
formation, was a Masque presented by Charles and
Henrietta Maria at Shrovetide 1640. The usual sum
of 1,400/. had been granted for the mounting of the
piece ; and an additional sum of 1 20/. was expended on
the King s costume. What the subject was, or who
wrote the libretto, is not known. But we may believe
that Whitehall presented to the outer eye on this, as on
so many previous occasions, a pageant of undimmed
magnificence, a scene of undisturbed security. The
Monarchy of England, indeed, was tottering already
to its fall ; the foundations of society were crumbling.
Yet, as usual, the hall was crowded with noble men
and noble women, exchanging compliments beneath
the torches, dancing brawls or galliards, as though
there were no Pym and Hampden in existence. Those
brilliant and bejewelled cavaliers, innocent as yet of
civil strife, unstained with fratricidal slaughter, were
soon to part, with anger in their breasts and everlasting
farewell on their lips, for adverse camps. Gazing in

THE MASQUE AND THE DRAMA, 359

fancy on the women at their side, that voice which
De Quincey heard in vision thrills our ears : * These
are English ladies from the unhappy times of Charles I.
These are the wives and daughters of those who met
in peace, and sat at the same tables, and were allied
by marriage or by blood ; and yet, after a certain day
in August 1642, never smiled upon each other again,
nor met but on the field of battle ; and at Marston
Moor, at Newbury, or at Naseby, cut asunder all ties
of love by the cruel sabre, and washed away in blood
the memory of ancient friendship/

XIV.

It remains to note the effects of Masques at Court
upon the Drama. Like everything which formed a
prominent part of the national life, the Masque was
adopted and incorporated into the popular art of the
theatres. Shakspere in ' The Tempest ' has left us an
example of its most judicious introduction, as a brief
interlude, in the conduct of a serious play. A similarly
successful instance might be cited from Fletcher's
' False One,' where the Masque of Nilus forms a
splendid and agreeable episode. The Bridal Masque
in his * Maid s Tragedy ' is not less beautiful and
rightly placed. Cupid's Masque in 'A Wife for a
Month ' presents the mere silhouette or sketch in
outline of a courtly pageant. On the public stage, it
was of course necessary that the Masque, exhibited
within a play, should be simple in its theme and
capable of quick despatch. Webster used a Masque
of Madmen with terrible effect at the climax of his

36o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Duchess* tragedy. Marston, Tourneur, and other play-
wrights of the melodrama, as they abused Ghosts for
purposes of stage-effect, so did they stretch this motive
of the Masque within the Drama beyond just limits.
It became the customary device in their hands for dis-
posing of a tyrant.

From the dramatists themselves we learn how City
folk and petty gentry crowded to Whitehall on
masquing nights.^ Men forgave their debts, and
women sold their honour, to obtain a seat. To have a
friend at Court among the Ushers or the Porters was the
heart's wish of those aspiring citizens who panted to
gaze on royalty and aristocracy performing actors parts
upon the stage of a palace. 1 he ante-rooms and
galleries of Whitehall became on those occasions a
scene of indescribable debauchery and riot. ' The
masques and plays at Whitehall,' writes Sir Edward
Peyton in his * Divine Catastrophe of the Stuarts,' * were
used only for incentives to lust ; therefore the courtiers
invited the citizens* wives to those shows on purpose to
defile them in such sort. There is not a lobby nor
chamber (if it could speak) but would verify it.* The
passages cited from Fletcher and Jonson in a note
appended by Dyce to this paragraph, fully corroborate
the Puritan's assertion.

Jonson told Drummond at Hawthornden, that
' next himself, only Fletcher and Chapman could make
a Masque.* Jonson did not live to welcome Milton's
Muse, or he might have added that a fourth Masque-

^ See, in particular, the Induction to Fletcher's Four Plays in One^
the opening of his Humorous Lieutenant^ the MaitPs Tragedy (act i. sc. 2),
A Wife for a Month (act ii. sc. 4), and the introduction to Jonson's Love
Restored.

MILTON'S MASQUES, 361

maker had arisen, who combined the art of Fletcher
with his own in a new style of incomparably higher
poetry. It is clear from indications scattered through
Milton s works, that the Masques which in his boy-
hood reached their height of splendour, had powerfully
affected his imagination. Both the songs and the
discourse of his ' Arcades * reveal, to my mind at least,
a careful study on the youthful poet's part of Jonson's
work ; and I find the influence of Fletcher no less
manifest in the lyrics of * Comus.* The meditative
music of the Genius speech, the .incomparable touches
of nature-painting scattered through the * Arcades,' and
the heightened dignity of language which raises this
little piece into the region of classical art, place
Milton already above his masters. But his immeasur-
able superiority becomes only unmistakable in 'Comus.'
This exquisite composition, in which poetry of the
loftiest is blent with philosophy of the purest and the
sweetest, bears upon its title-page the name of Masque.
But except in the antithetical treatment of the Spirit
and the Genius of sensual pleasure ; except in the
lyrics scattered with a hand not over-liberal through
its scenes ; * Comus ' challenges no comparison in any
ponderable qualities of craftsmanship with those sturdy
works of art in which James's Laureate strove with
James's architect for fashionable laurels. In the his-
tory of English literature, * Comus' remains to show
how the scenic elements of the Masque, touching the
fancy of a great poet, became converted into flawless
poetry beneath his hand. Nominally a Masque, it has
really nothing in common with entertainments which
demanded * bodily presentment ' and * apparelling 'upon

362 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

the Stage. Yet it would probably have never issued
from the poet's brain but for shows at Court. Masque
and Antimasque, sweeping before his sense, had left
their impress upon Milton s fancy. The memories of
those fair scenes, whether actually witnessed, or studied
in a printed page, dwelt in his mind, emerging later to
evoke that fairy fabric of romantic allegory which he
called the Masque of Comus. Had the * Midsummer s
Nights Dream' been composed by Shakspere for
courtly theatricals, or the * Faithful Shepherdess ' by
Fletcher for like purpose, this name might with equal
propriety have been given to those two pieces,

3^3

CHAPTER X.

ENGLISH HISTORY.

I. The Chronicle Play is a peculiarly English Form — Its Difference from
other Historical Dramas — Supplies the Place of the Epic— Treatment
of National Annals by the Playwrights. — II. Shakspere's Chronicles
— Four Groups of non-Shaksperian Plays on English History. —

III. Legendary Subjects — * Locrine' — *The History of King Leir.' —

IV. Shakspere's Doubtful Plays — Principles of Criticism — *The Birth
of Merlin.* — V. Chronicle- Plays Proper — 'Troublesome Reign of
King John*— * True Tragedy of Richard III.* — < Famous Victories of
Henry V.* — * Contention of the Two Famous Houses.* — ^VI. * Ed-
ward III.' — The Problem of its Authorship — Based on a Novella and
on History — The Superior Development of Situations. — ^VII. Mar-
lowe's * Edward II.*— Peele's * Edward I.*— Heywood's * Edward IV.'—
Rowle/s Play on Henry VIII. — VIII. The Ground covered by the
Chronicle Plays — Their Utility — Heywood's * Apology' quoted. — IX.
Biographies of Political Persons and Popular Heroes — * Sir Thomas
More ' — * Lord Cromwell ' — * Sir John Oldcastle ' — SchlegePs Opinion
criticised — * Sir Thomas Wyatt* — Ford's *Perkin Warbeck* — Last
Plays of this Species. — X. English Adventurers — ' Fair Maid of the
West '— « The Shiriey Brothers *— « Sir Thomas Stukeley '—His Life
— Dramatised in * The Famous History,* &c. — ' Battle of Alcazar.' —
XI. Apocryphal Heroes — ^^ Fair Em* — 'Blind Beggar of Bethnal
Green * — Two Plays on the Robin Hood Legend — English Partiality
for Outlaws — Life in Sherwood — * George a Greene * — Jonson*s * Sad
Shepherd ' — Popularity in England of Princes who have shared the
People's Sports and Pastimes.

N.B. The Historical Plays discussed in this chapter will be found as
follows : * Locrine,* * The Birth of Merlin,* * Lord Cromwell,* in the
Tauchnitz edition of Shakespeare's * Doubtful Plays ; * * King Leir,*

* Troublesome Reign of King John,* 'True Tragedy of Richard IIL,*

* Famous Victories of Henry V.,* * Contention of the Two Houses,* in W.
C. Hazlitt's * Shakespeare's Library ;' * Edward III.' in Delius* * Pseudo-
Shakspere'sche Dramen ; * Marlowe's, Peele's, Heywood's Chronicles in
Dyce's "editions of Marlowe and Peeleand Pearson's reprint of Heywood;
Rowley's * When You See Me, You Know Me,* in Karl Elze*s reprint ;
' Sir Thomas More,' in the Old Shakespeare Society's Publications ;

364 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

* Sir Thomas Wyatt/ in Dyce's * Webster/ and * Perkin Warbeck ' in
Gifford's * Ford ; ' * The Famous History of Sir Thomas Stukeley ' in
Simpson's * School of Shakspere,' and * The Battle of Alcazar ' in Dyce's

* Peele ; ' ' Fair Em ' in Delius ; * The Blind Beggar ' and * The Shirley
Brothers ' in Bullen's * Day ; * * Dick of Devonshire ' in Bullen's * Old
Plays;* the two plays on * Robert, Earl of Huntingdon," in Hazlitt's

* Dodsley,' vol. viii. ; * George a Greene ' in Dyce's * Greene/

The Chronicle Play is peculiar to English literature.
The lost tragedy by Phrynichus, entitled ' The Capture
of Miletus/ which is said to have cost the poet a con-
siderable fine from the Athenian people, and the
triumphal pageant of * The Persae/ in which iEschylus
sang the paean of the Greek race over conquered Asia,
cannot be reckoned in the same class as the Chronicles
of Shakspere and his predecessors. Nor do the few
obscure plays produced by Italian authors upon events
in their national history, whether we take into account
Mussato's ' Eccelinis * or the popular Representation
of * Lautrec,' deserve this title. Coleridge has re-
marked that our Chronicle Play occupies an inter-
mediate place between the Epic and the Drama. It
is not, like the ' Wallenstein ' of Schiller or Victor
Hugo s ' Roi s'amuse,' an episode selected from the
national annals, and dramatised because of its peculiar
tragic or satiric fitness. I ts characteristic quality is the
dramatic presentation in a single action of the lead-
ing events of a reign. The Chronicle Plays, which in
the Elizabethan age probably covered the whole field
of English history, had for their object the scenic
exposition of our annals to the nation. If we pos-
sessed that series intact, we should see unrolled before
us, as in a gigantic and unequal epic, the succession

THE CHRONICLE PLAV, 365

of events and vicissitudes from mythic Brute to the
defeat of the Armada.

English literature possesses no national epic. The
legends of Arthur formed, it is true, a semi-epical body
of romance. But these legends were not purely Eng-
lish in their origin ; nor were they digested into the
* Mort d'Arthur/ by Sir Thomas Malory, until a com-
paratively late period. When our language attained
the proper flexibility for poetical composition, the
age of the heroic Epic had passed away. The great
events of our annals, whether mythical or historical,
instead of being sung by rhapsodists, were acted by
tragedians, in accordance with the prevalent dramatic
impulse. But the epical instinct was satisfied by the
peculiar form which the Chronicle Play assumed. The
authors of these works combined fidelity to facts and
observance of chronology with their effort after a
certain artistic unity of effect. They fixed attention on
tragic calamities and conflicting passions, endeavouring,
so far as in them lay, to bring the characters of men in
action into striking prominence. As the scientific^
historian seeks to investigate the laws which underlie
a nation's growth, regarding men as agents in the pro-
cess of evolution ; so, by a converse method, our drama-
tists fixed their eyes upon the personal elements of
history, and kept out of sight those complex influences
which narrow the sphere of individual activity. The
one process presents us with the philosophy of history,
the other with its poetry. Neither mode of treatment
is dishonest, though the whole truth is not to be found
in either result : for the history of the world, as Hegel
remarked, has a double aspect ; and the highest aim of

366 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

the historian is to place the heroes who seem to resume
the spirit of their several epochs, in proper relation to
the world-spirit. As was right and necessary, the
authors of our Chronicle Plays made historj- subservient
to art, and character more potent than circumstance.
Yet they abstained from violating the general outlines
of the annals which they dramatised. They introduced
no figmentary matter of importance,and rarely deviated
from tradition to enhance effect Their chief licence
consisted in altering the relative proportion of events,
in concentrating the action of many years within the
space of a few hours, and in heightening for tragic
purposes the intellectual and moral stature of com-
manding personages. Episodical incidents were freely
invented ; but always with the object of enforcing and
colouring the fact as they received it from the annalists.
Only here and there, as in Peek's dastardly libel on the
good Queen Eleanor, do we find a deliberate attempt
to falsify history for a purpose of the moment I do
not of course mean to assert that any of our dramatists
were conscientious in the scientific sense of the word,
and that they did not share the common prejudices of
their age. What I wish to insist upon is that they
approached the historical drama from the epical point
of view, and that their main object was the scenic
reproduction of history rather than the employ-
ment of historical material for any further-reaching
purpose.

FOUR GROUPS, 367

II.

Were it not for Shakspere's Chronicle Plays, it
might be hardly needful to dwell at considerable length
upon this species. But these masterpieces are so unique
in their kind, combining as they do fidelity to the main
sources at the dramatist s command with perfect artistic
freedom in a harmony unparalleled, that it behoves us to
consider the crude work of his predecessors. In the
best plays of Shakspere's historical series, the heroes of
English annals are glorified, but not metamorphosed.
That grasp of character which enabled him to create a
Hamlet and a Lady Macbeth, was here employed in
resuscitating real men and women from their graves.
He translated them to the sphere of poetry without
altering their personal characteristics. Only, instead of
flesh and blood, he gave in his scenes portraits of them,
such as Titian or Rubens might have painted, by
dwelling on their salient qualities, flattering without
sycophancy, and revealing the dark places of the
soul without animosity.

I propose to arrange the non-Shaksperian plays on
English history in four groups. The first consists of
dramas founded on mythical events. The second is
the body of Chronicle Plays, properly so called. The
third is a set of biographical dramas, bringing English
worthies or famous characters upon the stage. The
fourth group deals with semi-legendary heroes dear to
the English people, or with pleasant episodes in the
traditionary lives of their princes.

368 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

III.

We have seen that the earliest tragedies of the
pseudo-classic school were founded on the legendary
history of England — *Gorboduc' and 'The Misfortunes
of Arthur/ A proper third to these two stilted plays
may be found in * Locrine ;' the subject of which is
the death of Brutus, first king of Britain, with the sub-
sequent adventures of his three sons. This drama,
a piece of passable but wooden workmanship, has long
been included in the list of Shakspere's Doubtful Plays.
There is, however, no shadow of reason for supposing
that Shakspere had a hand in it.^ ' Locrine ' is written
throughout in a level style of vulgar and pedestrian
bombast, tumid with the metaphors and classical
mythology which Greene made fashionable, and which
Marlowe transfigured. H umber, described as ' King
of the Scythians,* wanders fasting through North
English deserts, and soliloquises:

Ne'er came sweet Ceres, ne'er came Venus here ;
Triptolemus, the god of husbandmen,
Ne'er sowed his seed in this foul wilderness.
The hunger-bitten dogs of Acheron,
Chased from the nine-fold Pyriphlegethon,
Have set their footsteps in this damned ground.

All the characters, Britons and Scythians, with the
exception of the comic personages, who are not totally
devoid of merit, talk this fine language. Such interest

* It was printed ir. 1595, as * newly set forth, overseen and corrected
by W. S.* On this foundation the editor of the folio Shakspere, 1664,
included it in his collection. The best passages of the play, act iv. sc. 4
for example, are very much in the manner of Greene.

'LOCRJNE' AND 'KING LEIR: 369

as the play possesses, is due to the fact that it consti-
tutes a hybrid between the type of * Gorboduc ' and the
new romantic drama. The subject is treated roman-
tically ; but the author has freely indulged his pseudo-
classic partiality for ghosts. He introduces each
act with a dumb show, which is explained by Ate
'in black, with a burning torch in one hand, and a
bloody sword in the other.' He makes two heroes,
on the point of suicide, declaim Latin hexameters, and
puts Latin mottoes like * Regit omnia numen' or ' In
poenam sectatur et umbra,' into the mouth of his
spectres. There are no less than five suicides al-
together in the action, the poet being apparently unable
to make his personages kill each other.

'The History of King Leir and his Three
Daughters ' takes higher rank than * Locrine.' The
unknown writer of the piece deals in the sober spirit
of an honest craftsman with the old English legend,
which gave to Shakspere material for the most terrific
of all extant masterpieces. The style is plain and
sturdy ; free from the intolerable pedantries and pet-
tinesses of Greene's mythologising school. There is
considerable power in the characterisation of the three
sisters, and no little pathos in the situation of Leir and
Perillus. Leir, Gonorill, Ragan, Cordelia, and Perillus,
indeed, only awaited the magic-working hand of Shak-
spere to become the Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and
Kent of his tremendous tragedy. Yet it must not be
thought that the master owed anything considerable to
this old play ; for these characters, together with the
main situations of the drama, were clearly given m the
prose story. What he has added, in the episode of

B B

370 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Gloucester and his sons, in the Fool's part, and in the
tragic close, is Shakspere's own invention. The play-
wright of ' King Leir,' adhering to the letter of his
text, left Cordelia happy with her father at the drama's
ending. We shall never know what moved Shakspere
to drop that pall of darkness upon the mystery of in-
scrutable woe at the very moment when there dawned a
brighter day for Lear united to his blameless daughter.
For once, it would appear, he chose to sound the
deepest depths of the world s suffering, a depth deeper
than that of -/Eschylean or Sophoclean tragedy, deeper
than the tragedy of * Othello,' deeper than Malebolge or
Caina, a stony black despairing depth of voiceless and
inexplicable agony.

IV.

The third play of this group brings us once more
face to face with the problem of inferior works doubt-
fully or falsely attributed to Shakspere. In dealing
with these so-called Doubtful Plays, we are * wander-
ing about in worlds not realised,' with no sure clue to
guide us, tantalised by suspicious tradition. We
know that before Shakspere began his great series of
authentic and undisputed dramas, he spent some years
of strenuous activity as a journeyman for the Company
of Players he had joined. At this, period he was cer-
tainly employed in revising earlier compositions for
the stage, and was probably engaged as a collaborator
with unknown poets in the preparation of new plays.
That fairly competent writers for the theatre, men
capable of plain dramatic handiwork, and not devoid
of skill to imitate the manner of superior masters,

THE CANON OF SHAKSPERE, yji

abounded in London at this epoch, cannot be doubted.
Shakspere, moreover, as is clearly proved by the
gradual emergence of his final style, by his slow self-
disentanglement from rhyme, and by his lingering
love of prettinesses and conceits, did not start as a
dramatist with a manner so fixed and unmistakable as
that of Marlowe. When, therefore, there is any scin-
tilla of external evidence in favour of his authorship,
we are bound to weigh the question, and not to dis-
card a work because it seems to us palpably unworthy.
There is always the possibility that he may have had
a hand in it, either as a restorer or as a collaborator ;
or, again, that it may have been a trial essay in some
vein of work abandoned by him ' upon better judg-
ment making.' These possibilities or probabilities
fall into three or four main categories. We have to
ask ourselves : Is the doubtful play in question a work
of considerable merit retouched by the master s hand ?
If so, it may be classified with the Second or Third
Parts of ' Henry VI.' . Is it an old piece entirely re-
written and rehandled ^. If so, it will take rank with
* Romeo and Juliet.' Is it one on which Shakspere
engrafted fresh scenes of incontestable mastery arid
beauty ? If so, it finds its analogue in * Pericles.' Is
it one in which he wrought with a collaborator ? If
so, we may compare it with * The Two Noble Kins-
men,'or perhaps with * Henry VIII.' There remains
the further possibility of trial- work or prentice-labour
in a style rejected by the mature artist. Some would
explain the difficulties of 'Henry VIII.' upon this
theory, ascribing the parts on which Fletcher seems to
have been engaged, to Shakspere's own experiments

B B 2

372 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in an afterwards abandoned manner. ' Arden of
Feversham,' if we accept this fine play as Shaksperian,
would stand upon nearly the same ground, as an early
effort.

Such are some of the preliminary questions which
the critic has to ask himself. Yet having weighed
them in the balance of his judgment, he must face
another set of difficulties. These arise from the tribe
of imitators. It is comparatively easy for men of
talent in a fertile literary age to ape the men of
genius. Therefore, when we detect some note which
has in it the master s accent, but lacks the full clear
ring of his authentic utterance, we are forced to choose
between two hypotheses. Either the passage in ques-
tion is the product of his immaturity or weakness ; or
else it is the parrot utterance of a clever disciple. In
this perplexity a sound critic, if he arrives at any con-
clusion whatsoever, will do so by trusting his sense of
what the master would have felt and thought, quite as
much as by analysing language and rhythm — will ask
himself whether the real Shakspere conceived character
thus, or treated a situation in this way. He will be
cautious in drawing inferences from similarity, which is
not genuine identity, of style. He will form his final
judgment from a survey of the whole work in dispute,
not from a comparison of single passages. In some
cases he will rise from the perusal of a doubtful play,
as Swinburne rose from the study of * Edward III.,'
with the conviction that he has before him the vigorous
performance of no mean man, who, having sat at the
feet of two great masters, has managed to reproduce
their manner, with only a moderate portion of their

CRITIQUE OF DOUBTFUL PLA YS, 373

spirit. The fine anonymous 'Tragedy of Nero/ for
example, shows such enthusiastic study of both Marston
and Fletcher, that the ascription of certain passages to
either poet would be reasonable, were not the whole
work cast in the mould of a mind differing from
both.

There remains a further source of hesitation and
perplexity, which has to be taken into calculation.
This is the mangled condition in which plays, during
the whole Elizabethan period, were apt to issue from
the press — piratically seized upon by publishers who
had no access to the author's MS., but took on trust a
shorthand writer s notes. Many instances of deformed
versification, mutilated scenes, and confused grammar,
can be explained by the simple hypothesis of piracy ;
and it is therefore dangerous to reject a misshapen
piece of work, in the face of any external evidence, on
the mere score of imperfection or unworthiness. I
might cite the first issue of Shakspere's ' Henry V.* or
our sole text of Marlowe's * Massacre at Paris,' as in-
stances of what I wish to indicate.

From this digression I return to ' The Birth of
Merlin.' It was printed in 1662 by the bookseller
Kirkman, a most untrustworthy caterer and angler for
the public, with an ascription to William Shakespear
and William Rowley. Little indeed is known about
this Rowley's life. But if he collaborated with Shak-
spere, it must have been in the full maturity of that
poet's powers. Nothing in the plan or style of the
play reminds us of the adult Shakspere. If therefore
we attach any value to Kirkman's title-page, we must
suppose that Rowley retouched an early piece in

374 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

which Shakspere was known to have had some hand ;
or that Shakspere received this piece of Rowley's for
his theatre with approval. There are Shaksperian
qualities in * The Birth of Merlin ; ' but these can be
accounted for by referring it to the post-Shaksperian
epoch, when the master s manner had helped to create
a current style

The play is by no means despicable, though far
too long, crowded with irrelevant dramatic stuff, and
confused in action. The intricacy of the warp, and
the intellectual vivacity of the woof woven over it, are
not altogether unlike the early work of Shakspere.
The cast of some soliloquies, with interjected philo-
sophical reflections, the contorted phrasing and occa-
sional pregnancy of thought, taken in combination with
the absence of Greene's mythological jargon, and with
a notable superfluity of motives and situations — the
very parbreak of a youthful poet's indigestion — mark
it out as, at the least, post-Shaksperian. It belongs,
indeed, in my opinion, to the category of plays suffi-
ciently imitative of the master s style to have suggested
the legend of his part-authorship.

' The Birth of Merlin ' is the second play founded
on the Arthurian cycle. It combines the tale of Uther
Pendragon's wanderings and loves with the story of
Merlin's diabolical parentage. Under the form of a
Court-gallant, the devil begets a child on a peasant-
girl. When he is born, this son, who enters the world
in full maturity and with more than a man's wisdom,
consigns his father to a prison in a rock, and addresses
himself to the State affairs of Britain. These super-
natural and romantic elements are, however, subordi-

* THE BIRTH OF MERLINS 375

nated to a medley of farce; and the ill-constructed
drama leaves no clear impression on the mind.

Having touched upon the style of this play in the
foregoing remarks, I must proceed to quote some
specimens. Here is a speech in rhyming couplets ;

*0 my good Sister, I beseech you hear me :

This world is but a masque, catching weak eyes.

With what is not ourselves, but our disguise,

A vizard that falls off, the dance being done.

And leaves death's glass for all to look upon.

Our best happiness here lasts but a night.

Whose burning tapers make false ware seem right ;

Who knows not this, and will not now provide

Some better shift before his shame be spied.

And knowing this vain world at last will leave him.

Shake off these robes that help but to deceive him ?

Prince Uther, in his love-lunes, exclaims :

O, you immortal powers,
Why has poor man so many entrances
For sorrow to creep in at, when our sense
Is much too weak to hold his happiness ?
O, say I was born deaf : and let your silence
Confirm in me the knowing my defect
At least be charitable to conceal my sin ;
For hearing is no less in me, dear brother.

A Hermit refuses to drink healths at a wedding feast :

Temperate minds
Covet that health to drink, which nature gives
In every spring to man. He that doth hold
His body but a tenement at will.
Bestows no cost but to repair what 's ill.

The following soliloquy, with its curious blending
of redundant blank verse and rhyme, has a passable
vein of thought :

376 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Noble and virtuous ! Could I dream of marriage,

I should affect thee, Edwin ! O, my soul,

Here 's something tells me that these best of creatures,

These models of the world, weak man and woman,

Should have their souls, their making, life and being,

To some more excellent use. If what the sense

Calls pleasure were our ends, we might justly blame

Great nature's wisdom, who reared a building

Of so much art and beauty, to entertain

A guest so far incertain, so imperfect

If only speech distinguish us from beasts.

Who know no inequality of birth or place.

But still to fly from goodness — oh, how base

Were life at such a rate ! No, no, that Power

That gave to man his being, speech, and wisdom.

Gave it for thankfulness. To Him alone

That made me thus, may I thence truly know

1 11 pay to Him, not man, the debt I owe.

The list of Chronicle Plays, properly so called, is
headed by Bale's * King Johan,' of which brief notice
has been already taken. ' The Troublesome Reign of
King John,' in two parts, deals with the same period
of our history. It is, to all appearances, a piece of
ivork posterior to Marlowe's * Tamburlaine,' written in
sustained but very rough blank verse, converting the
prose chronicle bluntly into scenes, and indulging in
but rare occasional diversions. A ribald episode in
rhyme, introduced into the first part, and containing a
coarse satire on monastic institutions, may be regarded
as a farcical interlude rather than an integral portion of
the play. When Shakspere set his hand to * King
John,' he found the bastard's part blocked out with
swaggering vigour in the elder Chronicle, the formless

'KL\G JOHN' AND 'RICHARD IW 377

germ of Hubert s character, and a bare suggestion of
the Kings contrivance for his nephew's murder. In
the evolution of our theatrical literature, it is singularly
interesting to notice the gradual development of this
historical drama in its three stages. Bale's perform-
ance marks the emergence of the subject, still encum-
bered with the allegorical personifications and didactic
purposes of the Morality. * The Troublesome Reign '
exhibits a dull specimen of solid play-carpentry in the
earliest and crudest age of blank-verse composition.
' King John' is a masterpiece belonging to the second
period of Shakspere's maturity.

*The True Tragedy of Richard III.' bears signs
of an elder origin and a more complex composition
than • The Troublesome Reign.' In form it contains
remnants of old rhyming structure, decayed verses of
fourteen feet, and clumsy prose, pieced and patched
with blank verse of very lumbering rhythm. The
play, as we possess it, must have undergone several
processes of botching and bungling before it settled
down into the printed copy of 1594. Some traces of
the pseudo-classic style are discernible in the Induc-
tion, which introduces Truth and Poetry, ushered upon
the stage by the ghost of Clarence crying aloud : O
citOy Clio, vindicta ! Setting apart the curiosity of this
obsolete conglomerate, the Chronicle has no points of
literary interest. It cannot be said to have helped
Shakspere in the production of his 'Richard III.,'
which, as Mr. Swinburne observes, is a study in the
manner of Marlowe. A still more singular dramatic
work upon the life of Richard is Dr. Legge's
' Richardus Tertius,' a Latin Chronicle Play, in two

378 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

parts, not modelled upon Seneca, but closely following
the English plan of such performances in regular
iambics.

' The Famous Victories of Henry V.* is another
piece of uncouth but honest old English upholstery.
It presents internal evidences of composition at a later
period than *The True Tragedy of Richard III.' and
may be classed upon a somewhat higher level than
'The Troublesome Reign of King John.' When we
have said that Shakspere built upon its ground-plan
in his Chronicle of * Henry V.' all that can or need be
spoken in its commendation has been uttered. The
romance of Prince HaFs youth, the episode of his
imprisonment in the Fleet, the incident of his
abstracting the crown from his fathers pillow, his
change of character, and his bluff wooing of* the
French Princess, are touched with artless and sturdy
straightforwardness by the stage-carpenter of plays
who made it. But of poetry or passion there is dearth
throughout.

The first and second parts of * The Contention
of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster'
are obviously the originals on which the Second and
Third Parts of * Henry VI.' are based. But they are
more than this alone implies. We have in these two
plays work in the process of formation ; new stuff
patched upon old, and materials re-moulded. It is
an open question whether Shakspere himself is
responsible for the part of Richard and for the scenes
of Jack Cade's insurrection in the elder plays ; or
whether, as I think more probable, we may ascribe
Richard to a poet of eminent tragic power, possibly

'EDWARD in: 379

to Marlowe, and leave Jack Cade in the rough
draft to some unknown craftsman who was not in-
capable of such a sketch. Taken together with
* Henry VIZ these Chronicles present an interesting
but insoluble problem to the critic. It is impossible
to analyse their successive and interpenetrative strata
of style, or to name their several authors with any
approach to certainty.

VI.

* Edward III.* presents a different but hardly less
perplexing riddle. This anonymous play, founded on
Dandelions story of the Countess of Salisbury and
Holinsheds digest of Froissart, was printed in 1596,
after it had already enjoyed some popularity upon the
stage. No one thought of attributing it to Shakspere
until the critic, Edward Capell, did so in 1760. There
is, therefore, in this case no spark of external evidence
in favour of Shaksperian origin. The Chronicle is
not, like the three parts of* Henry VI.,' a composite
conglomerated piece of patchwork, but the finished
production of one author, or at most of two authors in
collaboration. It displays unity of style sufficient to
justify us in believing that it was written off as we
possess it ; and this style is of a high order, considering
the date of publication. It is indeed so good that we
are forced to think of Shakspere and of Marlowe, of
Shakspere in his period of lyrism, or of Shakspere
following the track of Marlowe. Our critical cock-
boat, in a word, is afloat upon a sea, without compass,
now blown by gales from Marlowe s genius, now by a

38o- SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

finer breath from Shakspere s early Muse. We are
left to wonder whether the wind be not wafted from
some spurious quarter of imitative inspiration, or
whether it peradventure be an authentic blast from
either of those mighty ones. The first two acts are
separated from the last three not only by subject, but
also by slight differences of manner. The play,
indeed, is defective in artistic unity; for the first
part is a dramatised love tale, the second a dramatised
chronicle of Cressy, Poitiers, and Calais. The work-
ing of the former part is more poetical and masterly.
In the latter, the author has crowded incidents to-
gether; and though he touches some points with a
vigorous hand, he misses the true heroic ring, the
chivalry of his surpassing theme. On the supposition
of a single authorship by some unknown but not
ignoble follower of Marlowe and Shakspere, these
discrepancies are explicable; for the love tale of the
Countess was ready-made for dramatisation by even a
feeble hand in the glowing scenes of the Italian Novella^
while the Chronicle demanded the full powers of a
mature and mighty master for its condensation and
theatrical expression. Those critics, on the contrary,
who would fain detect the veritable Shakspere in Acts
I. and II. have something plausible to say. Suppose
he wrote these acts, and turned the copy over to some
journeyman to finish } • This would not have been
inconsistent with the practice of contemporary play-
wrights, and would tally well with what Greene spite-
fully recorded of the method of Johannes Factotum.
The date of publication must also be taken into account.
This was the year 1596, after the piece had been

QUESTION OF AUTHORSHIP, 381

* sundry times played about the City of London/ Now
Shaksperes 'Richard III.,' a work decidedly written
in the style of Marlowe, was not printed until 1597;
and the Sonnets — though this is unimportant, since
they had been handed about in MS. — were not
published until 1609. \^\^ not absolutely impossible
that Shakspere might have taken part in the compo-
sition of a Chronicle so good as * Edward III.' at an
epoch when he certainly had not yet entered into full
possession of his style.

Still there remains the fact that we have no spark
of external evidence to support the Shaksperian hypo-
thesis ; and I think that the arguments so ably and
elaborately supported by Mr. Swinburne in his essay
on * Edward III.' reduce its probability to almost zero.
But in this case, we are thrown back upon the supposi-
tion that before 1 596 there was a playwright equal to
the production of so excellent a piece ; that is to say,
a playwright superior to Greene, Peele, Nash, and
Lodge ; to all in fact but the two masters Shakspere
and Marlowe ; and one moreover who had deliberately
chosen for his model the Shaksperian style of lyrism
in its passage through the influence of Marlowe. That
such a supposition is not only maintainable, but also
in accordance with the anonymity of the play, is obvious.
Only we must remember what effect its adoption will
have upon the problem of other doubtful plays — of
*Arden of Feversham' for instance. We shall hardly
be justified in reasoning that no one but Shakspere
existed capable of the production of that drama, when
we have conceded a nameless author of * Edward III. ; '
for the point on which I am inclined to differ with Mr.

382 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Swinburne, is in rating 'Edward III.' considerably
higher than he does. Not merely, in my opinion, have
we here to deal with a mocking-bird who makes a
clever imitation of the callow nightingale, but also with
a playwright who in his way of attacking situations,
seizing on turning-points and hinges in the action (as for
instance when Edward unfolds himself to Warwick, and
Warwick to the Countess ; when the sight of the Black
Prince sways Edward^s resolution to one side, and the
sight of his mistress to the other), was more than merely
aping the method of a genuine dramatic poet. Yet, con-
sidering the extraordinary richness of the Elizabethan
age, the carelessness of playwrights for their work, and
the injuries of accident and time to which the literature
of that epoch has been exposed, is it not safer to postu-
late a score of unknown talents than to ascribe doubtful
compositions without external evidence to one or an-
other of the leading and acknowledged masters ?

Having dwelt at this length on the problem of
' Edward III.' I shall transcribe what seems to me the
best, and is assuredly the most Shaksperian, scene in
the play. Any competent reader will perceive that he
is in the company of no ordinary poet such as a Greene
or a Peele, and also that the inspiration, if borrowed, is
not in this place Marlowe s :

Countess. Sorry I am to see my liege so sad :
What may thy subject do, to drive from thee
Thy gloomy consort, sullen melancholy ?

Edward. Ah, lady, I am blunt, and cannot strew
The flowers of solace in a ground of shame : —
Since I came hither. Countess, I am wTonged.

Coun. Now, God forbid, that any in my house
Should think my sovereign wrong ! Thrice gentle king, -
Acquaint me with your cause of discontent

THE COUNTESS AND THE KING, i%^

EdicK How near then shall I be to remedy ?

CojiPi. As near, my liege, as all my woman's power
Can pawn itself to buy thy remedy.

Ed7i>. If thou speak 'st true, then have I my redress :
Engage thy power to redeem my joys,
And I am joyful, Countess ; else, I die.

Conn, 1 will, my liege.

Edti', Swear, Countess, that thou wilt.

CouN. By heaven, I will.

Ed7i; Then take thyself a little way aside ;
And tell thyself a king doth dote on thee ;
Say, that within thy power it doth lie.
To make him happy; and that thou hast sworn
To give me all the joy within thy power :
Do this, and tell me when I shall be happy.

Coun. All this is done, my thrice dread sovereign :
That power of love, that I have power to give.
Thou hast with all devout obedience ;
Employ me how thou wilt in proof thereof.

Eduf, Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee.

Coun. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst ;
Though little, I do prize it ten times less :
If on my virtue, take it if thou canst ;
For virtue's store by giving doth augment :
Be it on what it will, that I can give
And thou cjinst take away, inherit it.

Eduf. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.

Coun. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off.
And dispossess myself, to give it thee :
But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life ;
Take one, and both ; for, like an humble shadow.
It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life.

Ed7i'. But thou mayst lend it me, to sport withal.

Coun, x\s easy may my intellectual soul
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul.
Away from her, and yet retain my soul.
My body is her bower, her court, her abbey.
And she an angel, pure, divine, unsi)otted ;
If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee,
I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.

Kdii'. Didst thou not swear to give me what I would

Coun. I did, my liege ; so what you would, I could.

384 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Edw, I wish no more of thee than thou mayst give :
Nor beg I do not, but I rather buy,
That is, thy love ; and, for that love of thine,
In rich exchange, I tender to thee mine.

Court, But that your lips were sacred, O my lord.
You would profane the holy name of love :
That love you offer me, you cannot give ;
For Caesar owes that tribute to his queen ;
That love you beg of me, I cannot give ;
For Sarah owes that duty to her lord.
He that doth clip or counterfeit your stamp.
Shall die, my lord ; and will your sacred self
Commit high treason 'gainst the King of Heaven,
To stamp His image in forbidden metal.
Forgetting your allegiance and your oath ?
In violating marriage sacred law.
You break a greater honour than yourself :
To be a king, is of a younger house
Than to be married ; your progenitor,
Sole-reigning Adam on the universe,
By God was honoured for a married man.
But not by Him anointed for a king.*
It is a penalty, to break your statutes,
Though not enacted by your highness' hand :
How much more, to infringe the holy act
Made by the mouth of God, sealed with His hand ?
I know, my sovereign in my husband's love.
Who now doth loyal service in his wars.
Doth but to try the wife of Salisbury,
Whether she '11 hear a wanton tale or no ;
Lest being therein guilty by my stay.
From that, not from my liege, I turn away.

[Exit Countess
Edw, W^hether is her beauty by her words divine ;
Or are her words sweet chaplains to her beauty ?
Like as the wind doth beautify a sail,
And as a sail becomes the unseen wind.
So do her words her beauty, beauty words.
O that I were a honey -gathering bee.
To bear the comb of virtue from his flower ;
And not a poison-sucking envious spider,
To turn the vice I take to deadly venom !
Religion is austere, and beauty gentle ;

* These lines read like Haywood.

CHRONICLE PLAYS CONTINUED. 38s

Too strict a guardian for so fair a ward.

0 that she were, as is the air, to me !

Why, so she is ; for, when I would embrace her,
This do I, and catch nothing but myself.

1 must enjoy her ; for I cannot beat
With reason and reproof fond love away.

A high conception of this poet's power of rhetorical
dramatisation will be formed by the reader, who, con-
tinuing the perusal of the original text, observes how
the situation is prolonged by the entrance of Warwick
at this moment, by the King's ensuing debate with his
subject, and Warwick's unwilling execution of the
odious commission to persuade his daughter. Dia-
logue follows dialogue in an uninterrupted scene,
unfolding a succession of emotions skilfully conducted
to a doubtful issue. Then comes an interpose, in
which the Kings preoccupation with his passion is
strikingly exhibited, leading up to the final conflict
between him and the Countess, preluded by the master-
touch whereby the young Prince is made to sway
King Edward's inclination.

VII.

The remaining Chronicle Plays, of which I pror
pose to make a brief enumeration, offer no critical
difficulties regarding authorship. While this depart-
ment of the drama still laboured in the thraldom of
clumsy stage-carpentry, Marlowe's touch transfigured
it by the production of ' Edward II.' His play may
have been written as early as 1590 ; but it was only
entered on the Stationers* Books in 1593, and printed
in 1598. More will be said in the proper place about

c c

386 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

this epoch-making Chronicle. Peele gave the public
a drama on the life of 'Edward 1/ in 1593, which,
though it cannot be compared with Marlowe's, marks
a considerable advance upon such work as * The
Troublesome Reign * and * The Famous Victories.'
Following a scurrilous ballad on Queen Eleanor, and
yielding to the popular prejudice against Spaniards, he
stained an otherwise meritorious composition witli a
gross and unhistorical libel on the wife of Longshanks.
In the same decade, Thomas Heywood issued from
the press his two parts of the Chronicle of * Edward IV.,'
a principal feature in which plays was the episode of
Jane Shore. In 1605 the same author sent to the
press his play upon the reign of Mary and the acces-
sion of Elizabeth. It had been acted several years
before, and bore the curious title of, * If You know not
Me, You know Nobody.' Next year, the second part
of this Chronicle, dealing with Sir Thomas Gresham's
building of the Royal Exchange and the Defeat of
the Armada, appeared. The proper occasion for
estimating Hey wood's capacity as an author of
Chronicle Plays, will occur in the examination of his
essentially English art. Much in the same style, but
marked by inferior dramatic power, is the double
Chronicle Play by Samuel Rowley, entitled, * When
You see Me, You know Me.' It was printed in 1605,
but was probably well known upon the stage before
that date. As Heywood treated some of the events
of Elizabeth's reign, so Rowley in this formless pro-
duction touched upon those of Henry VHI. But he
could not or dared not address himself seriously to
the real history of a period so recent and so full of

DRAMATISED HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 387

perilous matter. The best scenes in his superficial
work are comic — Henry's meeting with the thief
Black Will, his imprisonment in the Counter, and the
vicarious birching of his whipping-boy Ned Browne.
Plays of this description, which bring English princes
on the stage in merry moments, were highly popular,
as will be seen when we discuss the fourth section
mentioned at the opening of this chapter.

VIII.

Adding to these inferior Chronicles the great
Shaksperian group, it will be seen that what remains
to us of this species includes plays on the reigns of
King John, Edward I., Edward II., Edward III.,
Richard II., Henry IV., Henry V., Henry VI.,
Edward IV., Richard III., Henry VIII., Mary and
Elizabeth — an almost continuous series of studies in
English history from 1199 to 1588 — embracing in
round figures four centuries, from the accession of
John to the Defeat of the Armada. The gaps in the
list of sovereigns are supplemented by Greenes
* James IV. of Scotland ' and Ford's * Perkin Warbeck,'
which deal with events of the reign of Henry VII.,
and by Decker and Webster's * Sir Thomas Wyatt,'
which forms a sequel to the reign of Edward VI. Very
unequal in artistic capacity, rising to the highest
in Shakspere and Marlowe, sinking to the lowest in
Rowley and the author of ' The Troublesome Reign/
these dramatists of our old annals performed no petty
service for the nation, at a moment when the English
were growing to full consciousness of their high des-

CC2

388 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

tiny. ' Gildon/ to quote some words from Mr. Halli-
welFs Introduction to ' The First Part of the Conten-
tion,' * tells us of a tradition, that Shakespeare, in a
conversation with Ben Jonson, said that, " finding the
nation generally very ignorant of history, he wrote
plays in order to instruct the people in that parti-
cular." ' This states, while it distorts, a truth. We
know quite well that Shakspere did not make, but
found the Chronicle Play in full existence. Yet he
and his humbler fellow-workers together undertook
the instruction of the people in their history. Nash,
in ' Pierce Penniless,* enables us to form a conception
of the effect produced by even such wooden work as

* The Famous Victories of Henry V.' upon a public
audience. * Tell them,* he writes, * what a glorious
thing it is to have Henry the Fifth represented on the
stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing
both him and the Dolphin swear fealty.' And again,
referring probably to the rough draught of the First
Part of * Henry VI.,' now lost : * How would it have
joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think
that after he had lain two hundred year in his tomb,
he should triumph again on the stage, and have his
bones now embalmed with the tears of ten thousand
spectators at least, at several times, who, in the
tragedian that represents his person, imagine they
behold him fresh bleeding } '

Hey wood, penning his * Apology for Actors' twenty
years later, and in the maturity of the stage, touches
more directly upon the utility of these performances.

* Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive,
taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous

BIOGRAPHIES OF ENGLISH WORTHIES. 389

histories, instructed such as cannot read in the dis-
covery of all our English chronicles ; and what man
have you now of that weak capacity that cannot dis-
course of any notable thing recorded even from
William the Conqueror, nay from the landing of Brute,
until this day ? being possessed of their true use, for
or because plays are writ with this aim, and carried
with this method, to teach their subjects obedience to
their king, to show the people the untimely ends of
such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insur-
rections, to present them with the flourishing estate of
such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance,
dehorting them from all traitorous and felonious strata-
gems.'

IX.

The third group of plays on subjects drawn from
English history includes those which dramatise the
biographies of eminent political characters or popular
heroes. The earliest in date of these is * Sir Thomas
More,' which was probably first acted about 1590.
This is a pleasant composition, suggesting to our
mind the style of Hey wood in the making. It deals
with More in his private rather than his public capacity,
drawing a homely but effective picture of the people's
idol ; the wise and merry Englishman ; the good-
hearted frank stout gentleman, who left the highest
office in the realm no richer than he entered it, and
who laid his life down cheerfully for conscience' sake.
Very inferior, both as a play and as a picture of
English character and manners, is * The Life and Death
of Thomas Lord Cromwell.' Nothing need be said,

390 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

indeed, about this lifeless and scamped piece of journey-
work, except to point out how, no less than * Sir Thomas
More,' it proves the freedom of the English theatre, in
spite of censorship. More was beheaded in 1535, ^^^
Cromwell in 1540, at the command of Henry VIII.
Yet about fifty years after these events, in the reign of
his daughter Elizabeth, these two victims of Henry s
policy were exhibited as heroes on the stage of
London. In * Sir John Oldcastle,* a play by Drayton
Wilson and Chettle, we possess the first part of a
similar work, rather superior in dramatic quality. It
deals with the life of Lord Cobham, the Lollard
martyr, who was burned in 1417. But for its false
ascription to Shakspere, and for the confusion between
its hero and Sir John Falstaff in the First Part of
* Henry IV.,' we could well afford to consign ' Sir John
Oldcastle ' to oblivion.

The names at least of * Lord Cromwell ' and * Sir
John Oldcastle ' must remain as danger-signals upon
the quicksands of oracular criticism. Schlegel fathered
' Oldcastle,' the authors of which Malone had already
ascertained, on Shakspere. And, as though he wished
to prove that owls are not more purblind in the day-
light than a German in the noon of unmistakable
internal evidence, he proceeded to ascribe ' Cromwell '
to the same hand. Concerning both plays, the one
correctly referred on good external grounds to three
inferior craftsmen, the other excluded by its style no
less than by its prologue's sneer at Shakspere from
even the limbo of Doubtful Plays, Schlegel wrote with
magisterial self-confidence, they * are not only unques-
tionably Shaksperes, but in my opinion they deserve

POPULAR HEROES. 391

to be classed among his best and maturest works.*
* Humanum est errare ; ' yet if something can be said in
favour of erring with Plato, all critics will pray to be de-
livered from erring after like fashion with Schlegel !

Place might here be found for a rude and half-
articulate show, rather than play, upon Wat Tylers
insurrection. It is entitled * The Life and Death of
Jack Straw,' and may be referred to an early period of
the Drama. In its bearing upon Shakspere's handling
of Jack Cade, this piece has a certain archaeological
interest. But not one of its four acts, however much
they may have entertained the groundlings, will arrest
a literary student s attention.

Two extant plays of a later period belong to this
class. They are ' Sir Thomas Wyatt ' and * Perkin
Warbeck.' *Sir Thomas Wyatt' is a selection of
scenes from an earlier Chronicle in two parts, written
by Chettle, Heywood, Dekker, Smith, and Webster in
collaboration, upon the tragical history of Lady Jane
Grey. In its present form it bears the names of
Dekker and Webster on the title-page ; and the hands
of both poets may perhaps be traced in it. When
Guildford and Lady Jane, after her proclamation as
Queen, are lodged by Northumberland in the Tower,
they exchange these reflections :

Guildford, The Tower will be a place of ample state :
Some lodgings in it will, like dead men's sculls,
Remember us of frailty.

Jane. We are led
With pomp to prison. O prophetic soul !
Lo, we ascend into our chairs of state,
Like several coffins, in some funeral pomp,
Descending to their graves !

392 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

This is somewhat in Webster's manner, though cer-
tainly not in his best. The following couplet may
possibly be assigned to Dekker :

An innocent to die, what is it less

But to add angels to heaven's happiness ?

Yet the whole texture of the play seems rather to
belong to another workman, perhaps to Chettle ; and
in one speech I am inclined to trace the touch of
Hey wood :

O, at the general sessions, when all souls
Stand at the bar of justice, and hold up
Their new-immortalistjd hands, O, then
Let the remembrance of their tragic ends
Be razed out of the bead-roll of my sins !
Whene'er the black book of my crime 's unclasped,
Let not these scarlet letters be found there ;
Of all the rest only that page be clear !

Let, however, the beacon of Schlegel warn a diffi-
dent critic off the perilous shoals of such assignments !
The strongest part of the play, as we possess it, is the
character of Wyatt. His portrait is drawn and sus-
tained with spirit. Resisting Northumberland and
Suffolk in their attempt to enthrone Lady Jane, de-
claring Mary's right by lawful succession, but protest-
ing against her cruelty toward the innocent and un-
willing pretender, then breaking the bond of loyalty
and obedience in indignation at the baseness of her
Spanish match — he is shown in all the changes of his
action as a fearless, high-spirited, tender-hearted, but
hot-headed English gentleman. He disappears, how-
ever, from the scene ; and the tragedy concludes with
the execution of Lady Jane Grey and Guildford in the

IVY ATT AND WARBECK, 393

Tower. If Dekker and Webster arranged this History
out of the materials of the elder Chronicle, they at-
tempted the impossible task of converting what had
been an episode, the part of Wyatt, into a complete
play ; and had to fall back upon the original cata-
strophe for their climax. Imperfect, however, as it is,
* Sir Thomas Wyatt ' deserves honourable mention as
the best of these early biographical studies from recent
English history.

Ford's * Perkin Warbeck ' takes a place apart, and
ought hardly to be treated in this connection. It
belongs to the period when dramatic composition had
become critical, and the playwright reflected on his
art. In his Dedication, Ford says, that he was attracted
to the subject by *a perfection in the story.' The
Prologue, after touching upon the neglect which had
recently fallen upon * studies of this nature,' proceeds

as follows :

We can say
He shows a History, couched in a Play !
A history of noble mention, known,
Famous, and true ; most noble, 'cause our own ;
Not forged from Italy, from France, from Spain,
But chronicled at home.

This is not the place to demonstrate with what
careful skill Ford wrought the materials derived from
Bacons 'History of Henry VII.' into an elaborate
drama. His play might be styled the apotheosis of
a pretender ; for he has contrived to maintain the
princely dignity of Warbeck throughout, showing him
more kingly in his dubious fortunes than either the
crafty Tudor or the easy-going Stuart The curtain
drops at last upon the courageous death of the

394 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

adventurer, dauntless in overthrow, professing to be
convinced of his own right upon the scaffold :

Our ends, and Warwick's head,
Innocent Warwick's head (for we are prologue
But to his tragedy) conclude the wonder
Of Henry's fears ; and then the glorious race
Of fourteen kings, Plantagenets, determines
In this last issue male ; Heaven be obeyed !

I have dealt only with extant plays on minor
characters in English history. But it appears from
various sources that many more were known to the
Elizabethan public. It is enough to mention a play
of 'Buckingham' (1593), Chettle's * Cardinal Wolsey'
(1601-2), Middleton's tragedy of 'Randal, Earl of
Chester' (1602), a 'Duchess of Suffolk,* a 'Duke
Humphrey,' an ' Earl of Gloucester,* a ' Hotspur,* the
fragment of Jonson's ' Mortimer,' and the play of
* Gowry,' which was represented in the reign of
James I. What these history plays really were, and
whether any of them were identical, in part at least,
with extant works, cannot be ascertained, unless, as is
possible, the MSS. of some of them exist.

Closely connected with these biography plays
are a small set founded upon the marvellous ad-
ventures of English worthies. In an age which
produced men like Drake, Hawkins, Cavendish,
Frobisher, and Raleigh, half heroes and half pirates,
explorers of hitherto untravelled oceans, and harriers
of Spain on shore and sea, it was natural that a

ENGLISH ADVENTURERS. 395

dubious undergrowth of speculators and adventurers
should spring up. The Queen herself not only tole-
rated buccaneering expeditions of a mixed military
and commercial nature ; but she also went the length
of risking her own money upon undertakings hardly
differing from piracy. The best spirits of the age were
bent on schemes of glory and aggrandisement. Even
Sir Philip Sidney dreamed of winning new realms with
his sword for England, wresting colonies from Philip,
and returning from fabled El Dorado burdened with
laurels and gold. Political ambition and the greed for
wealth went hand in hand with the chivalrous passion
for adventure and the restlessness engendered in an old
sea-roving race by the discovery of continents beyond
the ocean. The glittering dross which Frobisher
brought back from North America, the bullion of the
Aztecs and the Incas which was dooming Spain to
beggary and famine, the brilliant exploits of Cortez
and Pizarro, those paladins of pioneering bravery,
combined to stir a * sacred thirst for gold,* an 'un-
bounded lust of honour,' in English breasts. As
alchemy preceded chemistry, as astrology prepared
the way for astronomy, so the filibustering spirit of
this epoch was destined to inaugurate the solid work of
colonisation, exploration, and commerce, which has been
performed in the last three centuries by England. Its
first-fruits were the crippling blows inflicted upon Spain
in piratical descents on the West Indies and in
the ruin of the Invincible Armada. Its final result
was the formation of Greater Britain and the conquest
of India by the Anglo-Saxon race, solid achieve-
ments of wealth-extending industry and chivalrous

396 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

audacity beyond the wildest dreams of Elizabeth's
freebooters.

That the drama of the period should reflect an im-
pulse, which agitated the whole nation, was inevitable.
Our chief surprise is to find that the plays which deal
with this aspect of English life, are so poor. In ex-
planation of their inferiority, we may call into account
the difficulty of dramatising tales of maritime adven-
ture and of representing Oriental magnificence. The
subject-matter offered no central point, except in
episodes, to the playwright ; and the stage of that
epoch was deficient in spectacular resources. By far
the best portions of the plays which deal with the
biographies of Stukeley, Spencer, and the Shirley
brothers, are their introductions, when the scene is laid
in England. We are afterwards carried to the Courts of
the Sophy and the Sultan, to Indian islands, Turkish
dungeons, the palaces of European princes, the wilds
of Tartary, and battle-fields of Africa or Persia. But
however the shifting of these scenes may have amused
the fancy of a London audience, they offered no op-
portunities to the dramatic artist. He was forced back
upon a mere medley of disjointed pageants, through
which the bold English buccaneer moved, with an
arrogance peculiar to his age and nation. Hey wood,
perhaps, succeeded best in this species with a play in
two parts, called * The Fair Maid of the West.' It is
in reality the dramatised version of a contemporary
legend of real life, the hero of which is Captain
Spencer, and the heroine a girl who follows his adven-
tures. Rowley, Day, and Wilkins sink below mediocrity
in their hastily written and unhistorical version of the

HE YWOOD 'S PLA VS. 397

famous travels of the three brothers, Anthony, Thomas,
and Robert Shirley, who sought divers fortunes in
Persia, Spain, and Turkey. Much might here be said in
commendation of an anonymous piece, entitled * Dick
of Devonshire/ which its recent editor, Mr. A. H.
Bullen, is inclined to ascribe, on evidence of style, to
Thomas Hey wood. This play sets forth with vigour
and simplicity the doughty deeds and unassuming
courage of the English soldier, Richard Pike, who
won his freedom from captivity in Spain by challeng-
ing and defeating three champions in a duel before the
Spanish army. The arm he used on this occasion
was the quarter-staff, * my own country's weapon,' as
he styles it. A romantic fable is somewhat inartificially
combined with Dick's adventures ; but the real interest
of the comedy centres in the fresh and homely portrait
of its hero. Hey wood's patriotism glows in the
following spirited panegyric of Sir Francis Drake :

'I'hat glory of his country and Spain's terror,
That wonder of the land and the sea's minion,
Drake of eternal memory.

More than a merely passing notice may be taken of
one popular hero, who earliest engaged the attention of
our dramatists, and whose authentic history, reclaimed
by Mr. Richard Simpson, furnishes all the ingredients of
a sixteenth-century romance. Sir Thomas Stukeley's
chequered career is so characteristic of the period in
which he played his part, that I may be excused for
borrowing some details regarding it from Fuller's
* Worthies ' and from the careful records of his last
biographer.

398 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Thomas Stukeley, or Stucley, born about the year
1520, was the third son of a Devonshire knight.
There is a dim tradition to the effect that his real
father was Henry VIII. ; but of this no evidence is
forthcoming, beyond the somewhat unaccountable
acceptance he received at foreign courts, and the extra-
ordinary insolence of the style he used. Entering the
service of the Duke of Suffolk, and following the
party of the Lord Protector, he was forced by Somer-
set's downfall to take refuge in France, where he
fought in the campaigns of Henry 1 1, against Charles V.
Henry gave him a strong letter of recommendation to
the English Court, relying upon which Stukeley re-
turned to London in 1552. He then disclosed to the
Privy Council a French plan for seizing Calais, and
using that port as the basis for an invasion of England.
There is good reason to believe that Stukeley s infor-
mation was genuine ; but, be that as it may, he was
consigned to the Tower for his pains. On his libera-
tion, being unable to return to France, he joined the
Imperial army, and served for some time under
Philibert of Savoy. Twice, at this period of his
career, he addressed letters to Queen Mary in a style
which takes his personal importance for granted, and
lends some colour to the fable of his royal illegitimacy.
In the autumn of 1554, Mary granted him free entrance
into England and security from arrest during the space
of six months. Accordingly, we soon find Stukeley back
again in London, where he married his first wife, Anne,
the granddaughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Curtis.
Shortly after this marriage, being now furnished with
funds, be engaged for the first time in piracy. What

LIFE OF SIR THOMAS STUKELEY, 399

he did or failed to do, is far from clear. But during the
course of the next reign, his reputation as a freebooter
stood continually in the way of his advancement. It
should also be said that he remained a Catholic,
which may have been one reason why his peccadilloes
on the high seas were not more readily overlooked.
He held, however, a commission in the first years of
Elizabeth s reign as captain in the Berwick garrison,
gaining the goodwill of the soldiers, to whom he always
showed a royal generosity. In 1563, he planned his
expedition to Florida, concerning which so many anec-
dotes are told. Elizabeth favoured the scheme, and en-
gaged money in the venture. * Lusty Stukeley,' as his
contemporaries loved to call him, aimed at nothing less
than sovereignty. * I had rather be king of a molehill
than subject to a mountain,' was one of his favourite
speeches. And when the Queen asked * whether he
would remember her when he was settled in his king-
dom ; ** yes," saith he, ** and write unto you also." ** And
what style wilt thou use ? " " To my loving sister, as
one prince writes to another."' If Stukeley started to
found a colony and rule a kingdom, he returned a pirate.
His Florida expedition ended in nothing but maraud-
ing exploits, which infuriated the Spanish Crown, in-
volved the English Government in diplomatic difficulties,
and brought the Captain loss of credit and but little
pecuniary gain. A new chapter in our hero's romance
opens with his semi-official mission to Ireland in 1564.
The distracted state of that island made it the fit scene
for the operaiions of an adventurer. Sir Henry
Sidney took him up, and used him in negotiations with
O'Neil. Meanwhile Stukeley, looking about for a per-

400 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

manent settlement, entered into treaty with Sir Nicholas
Bagnall for the purchase of his Irish estates and the
reversion of his post as Marshal. The Queen would
not hear of conferring important office on a man who
had discredited her Government by piracy. Stukeley,
however, adhered to his plan of an Irish career, and
next attempted to establish himself as Seneschal of
Wexford. He had already bought the estates and
office of Captain Heron, when he was dislodged,
accused of treason, and imprisoned in Dublin Castle.
He was a Catholic, and was probably concerned in
a Popish plot for making Philip king of Ireland.
Having lain seventeen weeks in prison, Stukeley was
released on parole ; and seeing that all hopes of a
national career were over, he threw himself boldly,
as a Catholic and traitor, into the arms of Philip.
* Out of Ireland,* wrote Cecil in 1583, 'ran away
one Thomas Stukeley, a defamed person almost
through all Christendom, and a faithless beast rather
than a man, fleeing first out of England for notable
piracies, and out of Ireland for treacheries not pfu-don-
able.* In 1570, he set foot on Spanish soil, was
honourably entertained by the King, and began at once
to form a scheme for the conquest of Ireland. Philip
paid almost unaccountable attention at first to the pro-
jects of the English * rake-hell.' Closer inquiry into
the matter made him, however, relinquish the under-
taking as too hazardous. But, in the meantime,
Stukeley enjoyed high favour and substantial privileges.
He swaggered about the Spanish Court in fine clothes,
airing his self-assumed title of the Duke of Ireland,
and preparing himself for knighthood in the Order* of

A FREE LANCE. 401

Calatrava, which Philip graciously bestowed upon him.
The Irish plan came to an end without, it seems,
seriously impairing Stukeley's creditatthe Spanish Court
Yet his restless spirit could not brook an idle life of
compliment and ceremony. Passing through Flanders,
and intriguing on the way, he reached Rome in 1571,
where Pius V. gave him a splendid reception. After-
wards, he fought with bravery in the battle of Lepanto.
In spite of the comparative insignificance of his birth,
the ill success of his political projects, and his want of
estate, Stukeley had now created for himself a posi-
tion of some importance both at Madrid and Rome.
Whether he really passed for a royal bastard, or
whether he owed his elevation to address, audacity, and
the prestige of towering self-confidence, it is impossible
to say. I do not think it needed more than daring
and ambition, combined with a reputation for military
capacity and some specific touch on European politics,
to launch a man like Stukeley. The age of the Condot-
tieri was still remembered ; and the age of intriguing
diplomatists was at its height. Uniting the character
of Condottiere and political projector, and working
Ireland as his speciality, he climbed the ladder of dis-
tinction by personal ability and hardihood. There was a
place in sixteenth-century society for such adventurers ;
but how they contrived to support their station on the
slender doles of patrons and the meagre pay of war cap-
tains, we find it difficult to comprehend. Gregory XIII.
treated Stukeley with even more consideration than
his Papal predecessor or the King of Spain. He was
seriously bitten with the Irish project, and was thought
to entertain a notion of making his own son king of

D D

402 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

that island. Stukeley, as a good Catholic, an English
rebel, an experienced pirate and captain of adventure, a
schemer who had lived in Ireland, and who understood
its people and its parties, seemed exactly the right in-
strument for the Pope s plan of conquest Gregory
conferred upon his favourite many sounding titles —
Baron of Ross and Idron, Viscount of the Morough
and Kenshlagh, Earl of Wexford and Catherlough,
and Marquess of Leinster. Then, adding the com-
mission of General in his army, he sent Stukeley
to join the Portuguese King Sebastian's expedition
against Morocco. What followed is matter of history.
Stukeley breathed his last in the ill-conducted and fatal
battle of Alcazar in 1578.

By no means all the foregoing details were known
to Stukeley 's dramatic biographers ; nor did these con-
cern themselves with the political aspects of fheir
hero's career. The rebel disappears. The traitor to
his queen and country is forgotten. Only the bold
Englishman, climbing to the height of an adventurous
ambition, and dying chivalrously in conflict with the
Moors, survives. The first play on this subject is
entided *The Famous History of the Life and Death
of Captain Thomas Stukeley.' It was printed in 1605,
and was the work of an unknown author. The first
scenes are presented in a round clear English style of
portraiture. The old Devonshire knight, on a visit to
his son's chambers in the Temple, finding swords and
bucklers there in lieu of law-books — the scapegrace
hero's meeting with his father — the part of the page
between them — the wooing and wedding of the rich
heiress, Mistress Anne Curtis — Stukeley's quarrel at the

STUKELEY ON THE STAGE, 403

marriage feast with her former suitor Herbert, and the
payment of his bachelor debts with the bride's dowry
money — and afterwards his exit on a filibustering ex-
cursion before three days of the honeymoon are over
— all these details form a pleasing bustling intro-
duction to a pageant of adventures, which had subse-
quently to be helped out hobbling on the crutches of a
chorus. There is one striking piece of braggadocio in
the desert of dull business, which concludes this history.
Stukeley has undertaken a mission from Philip to the
Pope of Rome. He sets forth on his journey, and is
followed by an envoy bearing a gift of five thousand
ducats, upon which a percentage has been discounted.
The interview between Valdes, the King's Commis-
sioner, and the English donatee must have brought
down the gallery :

Stukeley, How many ducats did the king assign ?

Valdes, Five thousand.

Stuk, Are they all within these bags ?

Val, Well near.

Stuk, How near ?

Val, Perhaps some twenty want

\The bags are set on the table,

Stuk, Why should there want a marmady, a mite ?
Doth the king know that any ducats lack ?

Val. He doth, and saw the bags would hold more.
And sealed them with his signet, as you see.

Stuk. Valdes, return them ; I will have none of them ;
And tell thy master, the great King of Spain,
I honour him, but scom his niggardise,

[Casts the bags down.

And spurn abridged bounty with my foot
Abate base twenty from five thousand ducats !
I '11 give fi\Q thousand ducats to my boy !
If I had promised Philip all the world,

DD 2

404 ^IIAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Or any kingdom, England sole excepted,

I would have perished or performed my word,

And not reserved one cottage to myself,

Nor so much ground as would have made my grave.

Peele, if Peele was author of the * Battle of Alcazar,*
has given a distinguished place to Stukeley in the last
act of that play, dramatising the circumstances of his
death, and condensing the legend of his life in a long
dying speech. That the ' rake-hell,' as Cecil styled him,
was a favourite of the public, is proved by the fre-
quency of ballads and pamphlets touching on his story,
no less than by a casual reference which shows he was
a hero of the stage :

Bid theatres and proud tragedians.

Bid Mahomet, Hoo, and mighty Tamburlain,

King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest

Adieu.

XI.

The plays of the fourth group, dealing with legend-
ary heroes and the apocryphal history of England, are
for the most part poor. It is, for instance, hardly
needful to mention such feeble performances as * Fair
Em/ in which an unknown author of Greene's epoch
exhibited William the Conqueror in love at the Danish
Court ; or Day's and Chettle's worthless * Blind Beggar
of Bethnal Green,' founded on the mythical adven-
tures of Lord Mumford and his daughter. Three
pieces drawn from the history of Robin Hood deserve
more attention. These are Anthony Munday s * Down-
fall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon ; ' * The Death of
Robert Earl of Huntingdon,' written by the same

'ROBERT EARL OF HUNTINGDON: 405

author with Henry Chettle s assistance ; and the
anonymous * George a Greene, Pinner of Wakefield/
attributed on somewhat slender evidence to Robert
Greene. Taken together, these three dramas form a
fairly comprehensive digest of the legend of England's
most popular medieval hero.

Whether the famous outlaw was a myth, as
Mr. Thomas Wright has been at pains to prove, or
whether he had a real historical existence, does not
concern the present study. What is certain is, that
Robin Hood, the ideal English robber, was a very dif-
ferent personage from a Greek Klepht or an Italian
bandit. He represented all the virtues of the national
character, and some of its absurdities. He was an
* unfortunate nobleman,' deprived of his rights by
unjust relatives and a tyrannous usurper, whose only
fault in his more prosperous days had been over-
liberality, or love of generous living. Driven from his
home, he gathered jolly mates around him in Sherwood
forest, chasing the deer, and doing simple justice
' under the greenwood tree.* He lived, as Stow
relates, * by spoils and thefts ; but he spared the poor
and plundered the rich. He suffered no woman to
be oppressed, violated, or otherwise molested. Poor
men's goods he spared abundantly, relieving them with
that which he got by theft from abbeys and the houses
of rich carles.' Though he made free perforce with
the king's venison, he remained a loyal subject ; and
while wandering beyond the pale of society, he and his
merry men observed unwritten laws of natural justice,
charity, and mercy. His sweetheart, the daughter of an
earl, became Maid Marian, and dwelt a virgin huntress

4o6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

in his company, until such time as marriage rites could
be performed. The Anglo-Saxon features of this
legendary character, law-abiding in outlawry, loyal in
resistance to authority, respectinj^j Judge Lynch in the
desert, gentle to women, hospitable to the homeless,
generous to the needy, organising vigilance committees
to restrain indecency and outrage, unembittered by in-
justice, hopeful and self-helpful in adversity, exulting
in the freedom of field, fell, and forest, are unmistakable
and firmly traced. Robin Hood, as his myth presents
him to us, had probably no real existence. But the
spirit of the people which created him, has since
expressed itself in many a Western ranch and Rocky
Mountain canyon.

Nothing illustrates the wholesome and cheerful
tone of English popular literature more strongly than
the three Robin Hood plays which I have mentioned.
In the first of these, the Earl of Huntingdon is expel-
led from his fiefs and outlawed. He forms his republic
and gives laws to his followers. Little John declares
the articles :

First, no man must presume to call our master
By name of Earl, Lord, Baron, Knight, or Squire ;
But simply by the name of Robin Hood
Next, 't is agreed, if thereto she agree,
That fair Matilda henceforth change her name.
And while it is the chance of Robin Hood
To live in Sherwood a poor outlaw's life,
She by Maid Marian's name be only called.
Thirdly, no yeoman, following Robin Hood
In Sherwood, shall use widow, wife, or maid ;
But by true labour lustful thoughts expel.
Fourthly, no passenger with whom ye meet
Shall ye let pass, till he with Robin feast ;
Except a post, a carrier, or such folk

ROBIN HOOD LEGEND, 407

As use with food to serve the market towns.
Fifthly, you never shall the poor man wrong,
Nor spare a priest, a usurer, or a clerk.
Lastly, you shall defend with all your power
Maids, widows, orphans, and distressed men.

To this constitution, democratic in its essence, with a
touch of chivalry and of chivalrous hatred for the
lettered and moneyed classes, everyone agrees. Robin
turns to Marian, and draws a seductive picture of
woodland joys and pastimes :

Marian, thou seest, though courtly pleasures want.

Yet country sport in Sherwood is not scant :

For the soul- ravishing, delicious sound

Of instrumental music we have found,

The wingfed quiristers with divers notes

Sent from their quaint recording pretty throats.

On every branch that compasseth our bower.

Without command contenting us each hour :

For arras-hangings and rich tapestry.

We have sweet nature's best embroidery :

For thy steel glass, wherein thou wont'st to look,

Thy crystal eyes gaze in a crystal brook:

At court a flower or two did deck thy head ;

Now with w^hole garlands is it circled ;

For what we want in w^ealth, we have in flowers,

And what we lose in hall, we find in bowers.

He only omits what the song in * As You Like It'

dwells upon in passing — * winter and rough weather.'

The hero's portrait is completed in the speech of a

private enemy, who eventually procures his death by

poison :

I hate thy cousin. Earl of Huntingdon,
Because so many love him as there do.
And I myself am lovM of so few.
Nay, I have other reasons for my hate :
He is a fool, and will be reconciled
To any foe he hath ; he is too mild

4o8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Too honest for this world, fitter for heaven.

He will not kill these greedy cormorants,

Nor strip base peasants of the wealth they have.

He does abuse a thief s name and an outlaw's,

And is, indeed, no outlaw nor no thief :

He is unworthy of such reverend names.

Besides, he keeps a paltry whimling girl.

And will not bed, forsooth, before he bride.

I '11 stand to 't, he abuses maidenhead.

That will not take it being offered.

Hinders the commonwealth of able men !

Another thing I hate him for again :

He says his prayers, fasts eves, gives alms, does good:

For these and such like crimes swears Doncaster

To work the speedy death of Robin Hood.

The second part opens with the death of Robin,
and proceeds with the romantic history of Marian.
She is pursued by King John, who woos her with law-
less violence till she finds relief in death. The play
becomes a chronicle of minor events in John s reign.
He is drawn as a detestable tyrant, cruel and lustful.
By far the most powerful episode of the piece is the
description of Lady Bruce and her son starved to death
in Windsor Castle.

* George a Greene ' interweaves an incident in the
Robin Hood legend with the valorous exploits of
another popular hero. The Pinner of Wakefield by his
personal strength and influence quells the rebellion of
Lord Kendal, forces Sir Gilbert Mannering to eat the
traitor s seal, and entraps James, King of Scotland, who
has crossed the Border on a foray. The Pinner s fame
reaches to Sherwood Forest; and Robin Hood, putting
himself at the head of his merry men, goes forth to
visit the Yorkshire champion at Wakefield. George
beats the merry men at their own weapons, and

'GEORGE A GREENE' AND 'SAD SHEPHERD: 409

fraternises with Robin. King Edward of England
and James of Scotland join the fun in disguise, carouse
with shoemakers, and after making known their royal
personages, wind the play up with a general jollifica-
tion.

Before quitting the dramatised versions of Robin
Hood's legend, I ought here to mention the fragment
of Ben Jonsons 'Sad Shepherd.* Whether the im-
perfect state in which that play has come down to
us, be due to the accident of death, intervening before
the poet had versified further than the opening of the
third act, or else to the carelessness of those who
undertook the charge of editing his manuscripts,
cannot be determined. But students will agree that
few of the many losses which English Dramatic
Literature has sustained, are comparable to that of * The
Sad Shepherd/ This last offspring of Jonson's Muse
promised to be one of the most interesting and
entertaining, as it certainly would have been the most
complete and regular, of English Pastorals. Lacking
it, our Drama may be said to miss a mature and
purely national masterpiece, in the pastoral style.
Fletcher's * Faithful Shepherdess,' however beautiful,
is still an echo from Italian literature. Jonson in his
* Sad Shepherd ' interwove romantic fable with the
myth of an English hero, who, though he was localised
as an outlaw in Sherwood, may probably have been
a rustic deity, surviving from the dim antiquity of
Northern paganism.

History is, so to speak, nowhere in plays of this
description. Their authors sought to dramatise the
doughty deeds of common folk, and to exhibit English

4IO SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

kings and princes mixing with simple people, sharing
their sports, making love to their daughters, receiving
hospitality from humble entertainers. Greene s ' Friar
Bacon,' of which some notice will be taken in the
proper place, represents this species fairly ; so do the
opening scenes of * The Famous Victories of Henry V.'
Heywood worked the same vein in his * Edward IV. ;'
while Shakspere, laying his golden touch on all that
lesser men made popular, bequeathed to us the highest
picture of this kind in his portrait of Prince Hal.
That the portrait has been proved mythical, when
tested by the touchstone of State documents, does not
signify. It owes its force, its permanent artistic value,
to the animating sentiment, a sentiment akin, though
different, to that which runs through Robin Hood's
conception.

The English working classes, loyal to the Crown,
in spite of civil wars and treasons, have always loved to
pat their princes on the back, to hob and nob with
nobles, and if possible with scions of the royal race.
Heirs apparent, who understood the secret of this
popularity, have not unwillingly infused a grain of
Bohemianism into their conduct. We may regard this
partiality for madcap princes as a settled factor in the
English Constitution. Based on a sound foundation —
upon the touch of nature which makes all men kin —
the willingness of royalty to sign its debt to vulgar
sympathies, the pleasure of the folk to see that debt
acknowledged — this sowing of wild oats in common by
the people and their beardless rulers constitutes a bond
of sentiment more forcible than statutes. It eliminates
the moneyed aristocracy, depreciates the courtier, ex-

MADCAP PRINCES. 411

poses the squirearchy to ridicule, effaces the shams of
etiquette and caste. It brings the extremes of society,
those who in their several stations risk the most and
suffer most from the encroachments of the intermediate
classes, into fellowship. Meanwhile, in England, the
law-abiding instinct has been ever hitherto respected,
in legend no less than in fact. Prince Hal and Bluff
Harry go to prison for their scapegrace tricks, and
bear the Justice no ill-will. We might, perhaps,
attribute something in the failure of the Stuarts to
their non-recognition of this English idiosyncrasy, and
something also in the popularity of the present royal
family to their perception of the same. Be this as it
may, the dramatists of the great epoch, with their keen
sense of national characteristics, seized upon the point,
and left us a gallery of pictures in the style I have
attempted to describe.

In order to complete this study, it would have been
admissible to catalogue those plays which glorify the
several guilds, trades, and popular crafts of England —
to show how the City and Corporation, the King's
Jesters, prominent Clowns like Tarlton, the Prentices
of London, the Shoemakers, Thieves, and Jolly Beggars,
all of them representing English life under one or more
distinctive aspects, received due meed of dramatic cele-
bration. To carry out such analysis in detail might be
curious, but hardly interesting. Opportunity, more-
over, will be offered for resuming these points in the
course of further inquiries.

412 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

CHAPTER XL

DOMESTIC TRAGEDY.

I. Induction to a * Warning for Fair Women ' — Peculiar Qualities of the
Domestic Tragedy — Its Realism — Its Early Popularity — List of Plays
of this Description — Their Sources. — II. Five Plays selected for
Examination— Questions of disputed Authorship — Shakspere's sug-
gested part in Three of these — The different Aspects of Realism io
them. — III. * A Warning for Fair Women ' — The Story — Use of Dumb
Show — Bye-Scenes — Handling of the Prose-Tale — Critique of the Style
and Character- Drawing of this Play — Its deliberate Moral Intention.
— IV. * A Yorkshire Tragedy' — The Crime of Walter Calverley — His
Character in the Drama — Demoniacal Possession. —V. *Arden of
Feversham' — Difficulty of dealing with it — Its Unmitigated Horror —
Fidelity to Holinshed's Chronicle — Intense Nature of its Imaginative
Realism — Character of Arden— Character of Mosbie — A Gallery of
Scoundrels — Two Types of Murderers — Michael's Terror — Alice
Arden — Her Relation to some Women of Shakspere — Development of
her Murderous Intention — Quarrel with Mosbie — The Crescendo of her
Passion — Redeeming Points in her Character — Incidentsand Episodes.
— VI. *A Woman Killed with Kindness'— The Gentleness of this
Tragedy — The Plot — Italian Underplot adapted to English Life — Cha-
racter of Mr. Frankford — The Scene in the Bedchamber — Character
of Mrs. Frankford — Wendoll — Question regarding the Moral Tone of
the Last Act — Religious Sentiment. — VII. * Witch of Edmonton' —
Its Joint-Authorship — The Story — Female Parts — Two Plays patched
together — Mother Sawyer — The Realistic Picture of an English Witch
— Humane Treatment of Witchcraft in this Play.

N.B. Of the Tragedies discussed in this chapter, the text of * A
Warning to Fair Women ' will be found in Simpson's * School of Shak-
spere,' vol. ii. ; that of * A Yorkshire Tragedy,' in Tauchnitz's edition of
* Six Doubtful Plays of William Shakespeare ; ' that of * Arden of Fever-
sham' in Delius' * Pseudo-Shakspere'sche Dramen ;' that of *A Woman
Killed with Kindness,' in Collier's * Dodsley,' vol. vii.; that of * The Witch
of Edmonton ' in GifTord's * Ford,' vol. ii.

TRAGEDY, HISTORY, COMEDY, ^i^

The Induction to a play, first published, without name
of author, in 1599, is a dialogue between History,
Tragedy, and Comedy, the three species at that epoch
recognised in English Drama. History enters at one
door of the stage, bearing a banner and beating on a
drum. Tragedy issues from the opposite door, carry-
ing a whip in one hand, and in the other a knife.
While these august rivals dispute the theatre. Comedy
advances from the back, rasping a fiddle s strings.
Tragedy calls on both her sisters to have done :

This brawling sheepskin is intolerable !

1 11 cut your fiddle strings,
If you stand scraping thus to anger me !

The place is hers :

I must have passions that must move the soul ;
Make the heart heavy and throb within the bosom ;
Extorting tears out of the strictest eyes :
To rack a thought, and strain it to its form,
Until I rap the senses from their course.
This is my office !

History, feeling perchance her own affinity to Tragedy,
is not unwilling to retire. But Comedy replies with
taunts :

How some damned tyrant to obtain a crown
Stabs, hangs, imprisons, smothers, cutteth throats?
And then a Chorus, too, comes howling in.
And tells us of the worrying of a cat:
Then, too, a filthy whining ghost,
I^pt in some foul sheet or a leather pilch,
Comes screaming like a pig half sticked.
And cries Vindida I — Revenge, Revenge I —
With that a little rosin flasheth forth,

414 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Like smoke out of a tobacco pipe, or a boy's squib.
Then comes in two or three more like to drovers,
With tailors' bodkins, stabbing one another !
Is not this trim ? Is not here goodly things.
That you should be so much accounted of?

Tragedy is not to be daunted with sneers or criticisms.
She lays about her roundly with her whip, while
History, who plays the part of mediator, calls attention
to the hangings of the theatre :

Ix)ok, Comedy ! I marked it not till now !
The stage is hung with black, and I perceive
The auditors prepared for Tragedy.

This is the Induction to * A Warning for Fair Women,*
the second extant example of a peculiar species, which
may best be described as Domestic Tragedies. The
plays of this class were all founded upon recent
tragical events in real life. Tales of thrilling horror,
like those which De Quincey narrated in his appendix
to the essay on * Murder considered as a Fine Art,*
supplied the dramatists with themes for sombre realistic
treatment. As in the History Play they followed
English Chronicles with patient fidelity ; so in the
Domestic Tragedy they adhered to the minutest details
of some well-known crime. Fancy found but little scope,
and poetical ornament was rigidly excluded. The
imagination exercised itself in giving life to character,
in analysing passion, laying bare the springs of hateful
impulses, and yielding the most faithful picture of bare
fact upon the stage. The result is that these grim and
naked tragedies are doubly valuable, first for their por-
traiture of manners, and secondly as powerful life-studies
in dramatic art. The auxiliary fascination of romance,

DOMESTIC TRAGEDY, 415

the charm of myth, the patlios of virtue in distress, the
glamour of distant lands and old heroic histories, are
lacking here. The playwright stands face to face with
sordid appetites and prosaic brutalities, the common
stuff of violence and bloodshed, lust and covetousness.
Yet such is his method of treatment in the best works
of this species which have been preserved to us, that
we learn from these domestic tragedies better perhaps
than from any other essays of the earlier period what
great dramatic gifts were common in that age.

That plays founded on these subjects of contem-
porary crime were popular throughout the flourishing
age of the Drama, is abundantly proved by their dates
and titles, preserved in several records. All classes of
society seem to have enjoyed them ; for among the
earliest of which we have any mention are * Murderous
Michael * and ' The Cruelty of a Stepmother,' per-
formed at Court in 1578. In 1592, the first domestic
tragedy, which exists in print, was published. This
was called * The lamentable and true tragedy of
Master Arden of Feversham in Kent, who was most
wickedly murdered by the means of his disloyal and
wanton wife, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie,
hired two desperate ruffians, Black Will and Shagbag,
to kill him/ In 1598, appeared * Black Bateman of the
North,' a narrative in two parts, enacted by Chettle,
Wilson, Drayton, and Dekker. The next year, 1599,
was fertile in plays of this description. Dekker and
Chettle worked together upon a ^ Stepmother s Tra-
gedy ; ' Day and Haughton on ' The Tragedy of Merry '
and * Cox of Collumpton ; ' Jonson and Dekker on the
murder of * Page of Plymouth ; ' while * Beech's

4i6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Tragedy ' was acted by one of Henslowe's companies.
At the same time, the second extant tragedy, *A
Warning for Fair Women,* 'containing the most tragical
and lamentable murther of Master George Sanders of
London, Merchant, nigh Shooter's Hill, consented unto
by his own wife, acted by M. Brown, Mistress Drury,
and Trusty Roger, agents therein,* was printed for
William Apsley. * Two Tragedies in One/ by Robert
Yarrington, issued from the press in 1601. This curi-
ous piece, which we fortunately still possess, interweaves
two separate tales of horror, the one being the murder
of Master Beech by Thomas Merry, the other an Italian
version of the * Babes in the Wood/ ' Baxter s Tragedy '
and ' Cartwright' followed in 1602 ; * The Fair Maid
of Bristol ' in 1 605 ; and * The Yorkshire Tragedy ' in
1608. The last two are extant ; the former in a black
letter quarto, the other among Shaksperes Doubtful
Plays. In 1624 appeared two tragedies, the loss of
which is deeply to be regretted One of these was
called * The Bristol Merchant,* and was written by
Ford and Dekker. The other bears this dreadful
title : * A Late Murther of the Son upon the Mother.*
It was composed by Ford in collaboration with Web-
ster, the two most sinister and sombre spirits of our
drama, Saturn in conjunction with Mars. After this
date, the pure domestic tragedy seems to have gone
out of fashion. A lost play by George Chapman,
entitled * The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son/
was, however, entered on the Stationers' Books in 1 660 ;
and we still possess a piece by Rowley, Ford, and
Dekker, entitled * The Witch of Edmonton,* which
combines the tragedy of Mother Sawyer, burned in

SOURCES OF THESE DRAMAS. 41?

1 62 1, with a wife-murder by one Francis Thorney. It
was acted in 1623, but not printed until 1658. To this
list I will add Heywood s * Woman Killed with Kind-
ness,* a masterpiece in its way, first acted so early as
1603 and printed in 1607, but whether founded on an
actual history or not, remains uncertain.

The sources chiefly drawn on by our playwrights in
the composition of these tragedies, were Stow's and
Holinshed's Chronicles, supplemented by special tracts
and pamphlets devoted to a fuller exposition of the
crimes in question. The author of * Arden of Fever-
sham ' followed Holinshed ; the author of * The York-
shire Tragedy * worked on Stow ; the author of
* A Warning for Fair Women ' took for his text a
detailed narrative of Sanders' murder, which appeared
in 1573.^ It will be noticed that the most prolific
writer in this kind was Dekker, and that Ford on three
occasions devoted his great talents to the task. Shak-
spere, if we could tnjst the title-page of the first quarto
of the * Yorkshire Tragedy,' may have made at least one
experiment in domestic drama. Neither Jonson nor
Chapman nor yet Webster disdained the species ; and
it is probable that if the works of these men had come
down to us, our dramatic literature would have been
enriched with highly instructive objects of study. For
a note of the domestic drama is that here even great
artists laid aside their pall of tragic state, descending
to a simple style befitting the grim realism of their
subject. This consideration should make us cautious
in rejecting a tradition which ascribes to Shakspere one
of these homely plays. The same consideration will

' A Brief Discourse of the late Murther of Master George Sanders ^ &c.

£ E

4i8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

perhaps enable us to understand how Jonson may have
made those powerful additions to Kyd's * Spanish
Tragedy * which puzzled Lamb.

II.

I propose to examine five domestic tragedies,
beginning with the earliest and ending with the latest^
These are * Arden of Feversham/ ' A Warning for
Fair Women/ * A Yorkshire Tragedy/ * The Witch of
Edmonton/ and * A Woman Killed with Kindness.'
The first two were published anonymously, but have
been ascribed upon internal evidence by no mean
judges to Shakspere. Edward Jacob, in his reprint of
* Arden ' in 1770, was the first to suggest that the play
was Shakspere s. Tieck, who translated it in 1823,
adopted this view, and Goethe is said to have sup-
ported it. Mr. Swinburne in his recent 'Study of
Shakespeare * pleads eloquently in favour of the Shak-
sperian authorship. Yet there is absolutely no external
evidence to rest upon ; and so far as internal evidence
from style must be considered, neither the diction,
though vigorous, nor the versification, though far from
despicable, can be closely paralleled with Shakspere's in
his youth or prime. The most substantial ground on
which we might assign this play to Shakspere, is the
dramatic skill, the tragic force, displayed in it. Was
there any other playwright capable of producing work
so masterly before the date of 1592 .^ We may at

* By earliest and latest, I mean in date of publication, which is,
however, no exact guide to date of composition. Arden of Feversh€un^
for instance, has all the signs of more mature workmanship than
A Warning.

AUTHORSHIP OF ' ARDEN: 419

once eliminate Marlowe, whose marked style nowhere
shows Itself in scene, soliloquy, or dialogue. Greene,
Peele, and all their school, are out of question.
Neither Heywood nor Dekker, both of them young
men of twenty-two, are admissible upon the score of
any similarity between their earliest extant work and
this. Middleton is equally improbable. There re-
mains Robert Yarrington, of whom we know nothing
except that he wrote one domestic tragedy ; and to
whom it might be indeed convenient, but far too fanci-
ful, to ascribe the three domestic plays which puzzle
us.^ * Either,' says Mr. Swinburne, summing up the
case upon this point : ' Either this play is the young
Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was a
writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the
stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less —
to say the very least — than he was excelled by Marlowe
as a narrative and tragic poet.' The argument is
strongly stated ; and those who agree with Mr. Swin-
burne in rating ' Arden of Feversham ' among * tragic
masterpieces,' must admit the full force of it. After
repeated study of the play, I am myself inclined to set

' That is to say, of course, Arden, A Warmttg, and A Yorkshire
Tragedy, With regard to A Yorkshire Tragedy, it formed part oi Four
Tragedies in One, while Yarrington's known play on Beech's murder is
part of Two Tragedies in One, With regard to Arden and A Warnings
although there is a vast difference in the power of these two dramas, the
method of dealing with the prose text in each is strikingly similar, and is
in keeping with the method of Yarrington's acknowledged piece. I have
been both surprised and pleased to find this hazardous suggestion with
regard to Yarrington confirmed in a private communication made to me
by Mr. A. H. Bullen. He tells me that at one time he was inclined to
ascribe Arden and A Warning to the author of Tivo Tragedies in One,
About A Yorkshire Tragedy he says nothing ; and indeed, except upon
Fluellen's argument of an M in Monmouth and in Macedon, there is no
ground to group this with the other three.

E E 2

420 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

only a slightly lower value on it than he does. Yet
how dangerous it is to build on arguments of exclusion,
to assign to Shakspere unclaimed work chiefly because
we judge it masterly, when we remember the wealth of
dramatic ability in that fertile age, I have already
pointed out ! ^ Cautious critics, whatever may be their

* It may be well to try and state briefly the conditions under which,
if we incline to the Shaksperian hypothesis, we have to construct it
(i) There is no external proof in its favour ; but there is the difficulty of
assigning the play to any known writer for the stage, combined with the
fact that it is the work of a first-rate dramatist. (2) We know that
Shakspere was the * Johannes Factotum' of the Globe Company, turning
his hand to the most various jobs. (3) The unrivalled power which he
finally acquired over both character and metre was slowly developed after
many tentative eflforts. (4) What marks his earlier manner is a certain
shadowiness of character- drawing (e.g. in A Afidsutnmer Nighfs Dream)
combined with humour, romantic luxuriance of fancy, euphuistic conceits,
and a partiality for rhymed verse. (5) What marks Arden of Feversham
s considerable grasp of character ; absence of humour, fancy, euphuism ;
baldness of blank verse, sparely relieved by decorative or impassioned
rhetoric. (6) But the Domestic Tragedy was a well-defined species,
aiming, as the Epilogue to Arden states, at * nakedness' and * simple
truth ' without * filM points ' and * glozing stuff.' Shakspere may there-
fore have deliberately suppressed his own early manner when he was
called upon to produce a Domestic Tragedy for the use of his company.
It is also possible that he had a previous version to rehandle ; for we
know that a play called Murderous Michael was shown at Court in 1 578.
(7) As regards the solid character-drawing which marks the piece, this
was practically supplied to the dramatist by Holinshed ; and the careful
use made of Holinshed is remarkably similar to that which Shakspere
made of his materials. (8) We might therefore plead that the species of
the play excluded the young Shakspere's poetry and fancy, binding him
down to a severe and naked style ; while the copious text on which he
had to work, drew forth his latent powers of character-delineation.
(9) There are many detached passages which forcibly recall the style of
Shakspere. Some of these will be noted in the analysis of the play given in
this chapter. See below, pp. 448, 452, 456, 458. (10) Lastly, the hypothesis
might further be strengthened by recourse to the always convenient theory
of piratical publication. This could be used to explain the halting versifica-
tion of some scenes. But it is not very applicable to Arden of Fe^'ersham^
which came to press perfect at least in all its parts, and not compressed
in any of its numerous incidents. It is certainly of the full length.
Oldys says : * They have the play in manuscript at Canterbury.' If the
MS. is extant, a comparison with the printed text might go far to set this
point at rest.

AUTHORSHIP OF 'A WARNING.' 421

personal bias of opinion, must be content to leave

* Arden of Feversham ' among anonymous productions
until such time, if such time ever come, when light
may be thrown upon its authorship from documents.
Less can be urged in favour of * A Warning for Fair
Women.' It was indeed first published as having

* been lately divers times acted by the Right Honour-
able the Lord Chamberlain his Servants,' that is by
Shakspere's Company ; and Mr. Collier in his ' History
of the Stage' goes so far as to exclaim that either
Shakspere or the Devil set his hand to certain passages.
No true critic who rejects ' Arden ' on internal evi-
dence, will, however, ascribe 'A Warning' on the
ground of style to Shakspere. Should he follow Mr.
Collier s opinion in the latter case, he would be forced
a fortiori to credit Shakspere with the former play; for

* Arden ' is the ripe production of a dramatic artist,
while * A Warning ' is hardly better than a piece of
solid and sturdy journey-work. This tragedy may,
therefore, be relegated to the limbo of dSeWora — things
masterless, without an author's or an owner's name.

The case is somewhat different with * A Yorkshire
Tragedy.' This short play formed one of ' Four
Tragedies in One,' acted together in the same perform-
ance at the Globe. It alone of these four pieces was
selected for publication, and was printed with the name
of Shakspere. But the collectors of Shakspere's
dramatic works did not include it in the first folio ; and
we are met with the further difficulty that it was pro-
duced at the very height of Shakspere's power and
fame, when * Macbeth ' and * King Lear' had already
issued from his hands. Calverley's murder of his

422 SHAKSPERES PREDECESSORS.

children took place in 1 604 ; the play was published
with Shakspere's name in 1608 ; * Anthony and Cleo-
patra ' may be referred with tolerable certainty to the
same year. That is to say, between the date of the
crime and the date of the play four years elapsed,
during which Shakspere gave to the world his ripest,
most inimitable masterpieces. Is it then conceivable
that this crude and violent piece of work, however
powerful we judge it — and powerful it most indubit-
ably is, beyond the special powers of a Hey wood or a
Dekker — can have been a twin-birth of the Master's
brain with ' Julius Csesar ' or with any one of the authen-
tic compositions of his third period ? ^ Have we not
rather reason to reject it, and to explain the publisher
Pavier s attribution, by the fact that it attracted great
attention on the stage for which Shakspere worked, and
which he helped to manage } Judging merely by
internal evidence, there is, I think, rather less than no
reason to suppose that Shakspere did more than pass it
with approval for his acting company. A slight but
highly suspicious point is the insertion, at the very
climax, of a couplet from Nash's * Pierce Penniless ' into
the hero's desperate ravings :

Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart its several torments dwell.

* The peculiar power displayed in the short and stabbing dagger-
thrusts of Calverley's furious utterance cannot, I think, be paralleled by
anything in Shakspere's known writing ; nor, on the other hand, has
Shakspere ever drawn a female character so colourless and tame as that
of Mrs. Calverley. Neither the force of Calverley nor the feebleness of
his wife is Shaksperian. Mr. A. H. Bullen queries, while these sheets
are going through the press, whether it was perchance the work of
Toumeur. The suggestion is ingenious. But it seems idle to indulge
speculation of this kind on no solid basis.

AUTHORSHIP OF 'A YORKSHIRE TRAGEDY,' 423

This rings upon my ear even more falsely than the line
from Shakspere s Sonnets introduced into Edward III. :

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Were the style of the whole drama, in either of these
cases, strongly marked as Shakspere's, or were the
dramatic power as unmistakable as it is in * Arden of
Feversham,* then these lapses into petty larceny and
repetition would not be significant. But * A Yorkshire
Tragedy ' has nothing in language or in character-
drawing suggestive of Shakspere. The one-sided force
of Calverley s portrait points to a different hand. There-
fore this line of argument cannot be maintained, and
the * Yorkshire Tragedy ' must be left to share the fate
of * Arden ' and * A Warning.'

The two remaining tragedies upon my list of five,
present no such difficult problems as to authorship.
* A Woman Killed by Kindness ' is Heywood's uncon-
tested property. ' The Witch of Edmonton ' was
printed as * a Tragi-Comedy by divers well-esteemed
poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford,
&c.' The * &c/ is amusing. Though Rowley's name
takes the first place, a perusal of the piece will prove
that Ford and Dekker, collaborators on a second oc-
casion in domestic tragedy, were responsible for some
of the best parts of the drama.* They, at any rate,
worked out the tale of Frank, Winnifrede, and Susan.
I am diffident of expressing an opinion that the whole
of Mother Sawyer's tale belongs to Rowley.* Yet

1 ^\\€\x Bristol Merchant appeated in 1624 ; The Witch of Edmonton
was acted, according to Gifford, in 1623.

' The comic parts have, in my opinion, more affinity to Rowley's
work in The Birth of Merlin than to Dekker's in The Virgin Martyr,

424 SIfAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

this appears to me highly probable. It serves, more-
over, to explain the want of connection between the
two tlireads of dramatic interest, and the publisher
Blackmore's ascription of the Witch to Rowley.

Were I writinij for professed students of English
dramatic literature, I should hardly venture to enter
into the detailed exposition of plays so well known as
these five. Still they are not easily accessible to
general readers ; and the importance of the group in
illustration of old English habits, no less than as form-
ing a distinct species of Elizabethan art, is so great,
that I shall not hesitate to deal with them at large. The
characteristic feature of domestic tragedy, as I have
already pointed out, is realism. These plays are studies
from contemporary life, unidealised, unvarnished with
poetry or fancy ; they are this too in a truer sense than
any play-work of the period, except perhaps some
comedies of bourgeois manners. But this realism
which gives the ground tone to their art is varied. ' A
Warning for Fair Women * might be compared to a
photograph from the nude model. * A Yorkshire
Tragedy ' is the same model treated in a rough sketch by
a swift fierce master s hand, defining form and character
with brusque chiaroscuro. ' Arden of Feversham '
adds colour and composition to the study. It is a
picture, elaborated with scientific calculation of effect.
The painter relied on nature, trusted to the force in-
herent in his motive. But he interpreted nature,
passed the motive through his brain, and produced a
work explanatory of his artist's reading of a tragic
episode in human life. All this he contrived to do
without over-passing the limits of the strictest, the

DEGREES OF REALISM. 425

most self-denying realism. *A Woman Killed with
Kindness ' is also a picture, realistic in its mise en
scene and details, realistic in its character-drawing,
but tinctured with a touch of special pleading. The
painter did not stand outside his subject here. He
added something of his own emotion, and invited his
audience to share the pathos which he felt. Here,
then, we are upon the verge of idealistic art ; and this
infusion of idealism renders the work more ethically
dubious, akin to sentimentalism, tainted with casuistical
transaction. ' The Witch of Edmonton,' in its com-
position of two diverse plots, strays further from the
path of bare sincerity. There is no question here of
photographic nudity, of passionate life -study, of stern
interpretation, or of tear-provoking simplicity. The one
part, the part of the witch, is unconsciously didactic.
The other part, the part of the murderous husband
between his two wives, is romantic. Yet both didactic
and romantic elements are worked upon a ground of
sombre realism. The artists have drawn their several
effects from crude uncoloured homely circumstances.
No more than their predecessors, did Rowley, Ford, and
Dekker seek effect by rhetoric or by poetical embroidery.
We might compare these live stages in domestic
tragedy to the several qualities of realism exhibited by
a newspaper report, a scene from one of Zolc^'s stories,
a novel by Tourgu^nieff, a tale like * Manon Lescaut,'
and a piece of Eugene Sue's. These comparisons in
criticism do not lead to very much of solid value.
They serve their purpose if they remind the student
that what we discern as generically realistic contains
many species and gradations.

426 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

III.

In 'A Warning for Fair Women,' the hand-
some young Irishman, Captain Browne, meeting with
Master George Sanders and his wife, Mistress Anne,
at some civic entertainment, falls in love with the
latter at first sight. He notes a certain Widow Dniry
in her company, on whom he fixes with a roui^s in-
stinct as a proper go-between. This she is by nature
and profession. In their first interview the plan for
courting Mistress Sanders is agreed upon ; Widow
Drury's servant, Trusty Roger, is taken into con-
fidence, and Browne goes off to improve acquaintance
with his lady-love. He begins by walking past her
house, where she is sitting in the wooden porch await-
ing her husband s return from the Exchange. Browne's
suit does not prosper ; and when he takes his leave,
Anne exclaims :

These errand-making gallants are good men,
That cannot pass, and see a woman sit,
Of any sort, alone at any door,
But they will find a 'scuse to stand and prate.

The captain returns to Widow Drury, informs her
of his ill-success, and begs her to use some speedy
means for coaxing Mistress Sanders to his wishes.
The widow, who combines petty surgery and fortune-
telling with her other oblique trade, happens to find
the merchant's wife in a momentary fit of pique against
her husband. She soothes her down, flatters her, and
playing with her hand, exclaims, * How is this } You
are destined to be a widow ere long!' —

CAPTAIN BROWNE. 427

A widow, said I ? Yea, and make a change.
Not for the worse, but for the better far.
A gentleman, my girl, must be the next,
A gallant fellow, one that is beloved.
Of great estates.

With this she draws a seductive picture of her future
wealth and honours. But Anne replies :

Yet had I rather be as now 1 am ;

If God were pleasfed that it should be so.

* Ay,' takes up the temptress :

Ay, marry, now you speak like a good Christian :
*If Gk)d were pleased.' Oh, but He hath decreed
It shall be otherwise ; and to repine
Against His providence, you know 't is sin.

Then gradually she suggests the form and feature of
Browne to the credulous woman*s recollection, pre-
tending to read the signs of him by palmistry :

Briefly, it is your fortune, Mistress Sanders ;
And there 's no remedy but you must have him.

Meanwhile, the widow urges, Anne need not be too
forward. The stars will bring about her marriage in
good season. For the present let her only use Browne
with common courtesy :

As one for whom
You were created in your birth a wife.

The plot is set, and the first part terminates.

Tragedy now makes her entrance upon the stage.
She tells the audience they have as yet only beheld

The fatal entrance to our bloody scene.

428 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

A Dumb Show, which supplies a good example of the
employment of this device not only to explain but
also to advance the action, is introduced. Allegorical
figures of Lust and Chastity appear, attending Mistress
Sanders, who is led forth by Browne, while Widow
Drury thrusts Chastity aside, and Trusty Roger follows
at her heels. We have to suppose that Browne has
made use of his opportunities, and by the aid of Drury
has succeeded in seducing Anne. The lovers have
determined to anticipate the slowly-working stars, and
to remove Sanders. At the beginning of the second
part Browne attempts the murder, and is interrupted.
The third part, introduced in like manner by Dumb
Show and Tragedy, is occupied with the murder itself.
Browne, attended by Trusty Roger, falls upon the
merchant and his servant, John Beane, in a wood near
Shooter's Hill, effects his purpose, and leaves the
servant for dead upon the ground.^ But Beane, though
wounded to the death, has strength to crawl away.
He meets with a country fellow and his daughter, the
latter of whom is Beane's own sweetheart. They
rescue and take him to their cottage, where he lies in
sick bed till the time arrives for giving evidence
against the murderer. Browne sends Roger back to
Mistress Anne with a handkerchief dipped in her
husband's blood, and makes his own way to the Court
Conscience now strikes both guilty lovers. Anne, when
she sees her husband's blood, turns round upon herself
and her accomplices :

* Mr. A. H. BuUen points out to me the similarity between the treat-
ment of this scene in the wood with a parallel scene in Arden of Fciter-
shofH,

MURDER OF SANDERS, 429

Oh, show not me that ensign of despair !
But hide it, burn it, bury it in the earth. . . .
What tell you me ? Is not my husband slain ?
Are not we guilty of his cruel death ?
Oh, my dear husband, I will follow thee !
Give me a knife, a sword, or anything,
Wherewith I may do justice on myself —
Justice for murder, justice for the death
Of my dear husband, my betrothM love !

And so forth through an animated scene of self-
reproach and desperation. Browne is hardly less
unmanned. He flies, heedless of the blood upon his
white satin doublet and blue silk breeches, to the
buttery of the Court, where he draws ale, and excuses
the stains upon his clothes by saying he had lately
shot a hare. Then he hastens to Mistress Anne ; but
as he approaches her house, he is met by the little son
of his victim playing in the street. In order to show
how the author of this tragedy worked the motives
supplied by his text, I will transcribe this incident
from the prose ' Brief Discourse,* and place the scene
beside it. * He was so abashed afterward at the
sight of one of Master Sanders' little young children,
as he had much ado to forbear from swounding in the
street.'

EnUr Brown and Roger. Brown spies tlie boy,

Roger. How now. Captain ?
Why stop you on the sudden ? Why go you not ?
What makes you look so ghastly towards the house ?

Brown, Is not the foremost of those pretty boys
One of George Sanders* sons ?

R. Yes, 't is the youngest

Br. Both youngest and eldest are now made fatherless
By my unlucky hand. I prithee, go
And take him from the door; the sight of him

430 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Strikes such a terror to my guilty conscience
As I have not the heart to look that way,
Nor stir my foot until he be removed
Methinks in him I see his father's wounds
Fresh bleeding in my sight ; nay, he doth stand
Like to an angel with a fiery sword
To bar mine entrance at that fatal door.
I prithee step, and take him quickly thence.

When Browne comes face to face with Anne, she
spurns him from her :

Ah, bid me feed on poison and be fat ;
Or look upon the basilisk and live ;
Or surfeit daily and be still in health ;
Or leap into the sea and not be drowned :
All these are even as possible as this,
That I should be re-comforted by him
That is the author of my whole lament

Her lover tries to soften her :

Why, Mistress Anne, I love you dearly ;

And but for your incomparable beauty,

My soul had never dreamed of Sanders' death.

But she will have none of him ; and the scene suddenly
changes to the Council Chamber, where three lords are
taking evidence in the matter of the murder. Piece
by piece it is unravelled ; but the assassin, meanwhile,
has taken refuge in a house at Rochester. He, a
captain, ruffling in silks, goes to a butcher of the name
of Browne, and claims cousinship. The butcher is
flattered :

I love you for your name-sake, and trust me, sir,
Am proud that such a one as you will call me cousin.
Though I am sure we are no kin at all.

These bye-scenes, it may be said in passing — ^the

BYE'SCENES. 43 1

scene before Anne's tiouse-door, the scene in the Court-
buttery, the scene of Joan and her father driving their
cow home, the scene of the carpenters at Newgate —
are the salt of the play. It is their blunt unvarnished
portraiture of manners which gives value to a suffi-
ciently prosaic piece of work. In the butcher's house
Browne is arrested. Confronted with Beane, who is
brought bleeding on the stage, he mutters to himself : ^

I gave him fifteen wounds,
Which now be fifteen mouths that do accuse me ;
In every wound there is a bloody tongue,
Which will all speak, although he hold his peace.

It is hardly needful to pursue the slow, relentless
exploration of the crime further. Not a jot or tittle of
the * Brief Discourse ' is spared, from Browne's con-
viction and hanging, through the confession of Widow
Drury and Trusty Roger, to the final repentance of
Anne Sanders, and their several executions. One bye-
scene may, however, be dwelt upon. Anne Sanders
was hoping to the last to save her life. Browne had
died, manfully denying her complicity. His words
upon the scaffold prove him to have been no utter
scoundrel :

Have I not made a covenant with her [Aside,

That, for the love that I ever bare to her,

I will not sell her life by my confession ?

And shall I now confess it ? I am a villain.

I will never do it Shall it be said Browne proved

A recreant ? And yet I have a soul.

Well : God the rest reveal ;

I will confess my sins, but this conceal.

' This is one of the passages which are adduced to support the hypo*
thesis of Shaksperian authorship.

432 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Upon my death she 's guiltless of the fact ! [Aloud.

Well, much ado I had to bring it out [Aside,

My conscience scarce would let me utter it :
I am glad 't is past

Widow Drury also promised to shield her. But, lying
in her cell in Newgate, she overheard a man in the
street outside, who ' happened to speak loud of the
gallows that was set up, and of the greatness and
strongness of the same, saying it would hold them
both or more. ' This is how the playwright dramatised
the motive :

Enter two Carpenters under Netvgate,

Will. Tom Peart, my old companion ? Well met.

Tom. Good morrow, Will Crow, good morrow ; how dost? I
have not seen thee a great while.

Will Well, I thank God ; how dost thou ? Where hast thou
been this morning, so early ?

Tom. Faith, I have been up ever since three a clock.

Will. About what, man ?

Tom. W^hy, to make work for the hangman ; I and another
have been setting up a gallows.

Will. O, for Mistress Drewry ; must she die to-day ?

Tom. Nay, 1 know not that ; but when she does, 1 am sure
there is a gallows big enough to hold them both.

Will. Both whom ? Her man and her ?

Tom. Her man and her, and Mistress Sanders too ; 't is a
swinger, ifaith. But come, I '11 give thee a pot this morning, for I
promise thee I am passing dry, after my work.

Will. Content, Tom, and I have another for thee ; and after-
ward I '11 go see the execution.

Their conversation, a faint echo from the vulgar work-
aday world piercing the prison walls, determines the
catastrophe, by stirring Mistress Anne's fears, and
bringing her to conference with Widow Drury, who
declares her intention of making a clean breast of the

QUALITY OF 'A WARNING: 433

whole business. Anne thereupon gives up the game,
'and dies in a penitent mood.

Little, on the score of art, can be claimed for
this tragedy. The only figure which stands out with
distinctness from the canvas is George Browne. Him
we readily invest with brawny form and lawless ap-
petites. We see him swaggering, an English bravo,
in his suit of white and blue. On the scaffold we
are touched by his feeling for the woman, to win
whom he committed murder in this world, and to
save whose life he leaves it with a lie upon his lips.
Widow Drury has also, in the first part at least
of the action, a definite and recognisable personality.
She is not unskilfully portrayed as the human rep-
tile, squatting in slums and ill-famed haunts of vice,
whose secret nature only emerges into the light of
day to work mischief But though the play is a poor
specimen of dramatic art, its bare, indifferent pre-
sentation of a squalid crime may have been ethically
more effective and more drastic as a purge to a
burdened memory than a tragedy better qualified by
moving terror and pity to purify the emotions of the
audience. Lust and murder, the self-loathing which
follows guilt, the pitiful uselessness of bloodshed, the
sordid end of evil-doers, are unmasked with surgical
brutality. We readily conceive that what apologists
for plays were fond of urging in their defence, namely,
that they wrought upon the conscience of criminals in
the audience, may have been true of such a play as
this. One of the magistrates engaged in trying Browne
tells a story to this effect :

Y Y

434 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

A woman that had made away her husband,

And sitting to behold a tragedy,

At Lynn, a town in Norfolk,

Acted by players travelling that way —

Wherein a woman that had murdered hers

Was ever haunted with her husband's ghost.

The passion written by a feeling pen,

And acted by a good tragedian —

She was so moved with the sight thereof

As she cried out, * the play was made by her,'

And openly confessed her husband's murder.

Shakspere, in the first draught of ' Hamlet,' inserted a
prose tale to the same effect; and in the finished
tragedy immortalised the motive in those famous lines :

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play,
Have by the ver)' cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions ;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

IV.

' This lurid little play ' is the phrase by which Mr.
Swinburne characterises * A Yorkshire Tragedy.* No
better words could be chosen to convey its specific
quality. Like the asp, it is short, ash -coloured, poison-
fanged, blunt-headed, abrupt in movement, hissing and
wriggling through the sands of human misery. Having
dealt with it, we are fain to drop it, as we should a
venomous thing, so concentrated is the loathing and
repulsion it excites.

'Walter Calverley, of Calverley in Yorkshire,
Esquire, murdered two of his young children, stabbed

A YORK S HIRE TRAGEDY: 435

his wife into the body with full purpose to have mur-
dered her, and instantly went from his house to have
slain his youngest child at nurse, but was prevented.
For which fact, at his trial at York, he stood mute, and
was judged to be pressed to death/ This passage
from Stows Chronicle fully expresses the argument.
All that the author did was to introduce a few sub-
ordinate characters, among whom we may reckon
Calverley s colourless and over-patient wife ; and to
explain the motives of the crime. The play exists in
and for the murderer, or rather for the devil who
inspires him ; for Calverley is drawn as acting under
diabolical possession. He has lost his fortune by
gambling and loose living in town. His lands are
mortgaged. His brother lies in prison at the Univer-
sity for a debt contracted at his request. He returns
to Yorkshire in a frenzy of despair and anger ; the
game of life has been played out ; his children are
beggars, his wife an insufferable encumbrance ; a
calenture of murderous delirium seizes him, and he
wreaks his rage in a tornado of madness. The action
hurls along at such furious speed, the dialogue is so
hurried and choked with spasms, that no notion of the
play can be gained except by rapid perusal at one
sitting. We rise with the same kind of impression as
that left upon our sight by a flash of lightning revealing
some grim object in a night of pitchy darkness. The
mental retina has been all but seared and blinded ; yet
the scene discovered in that second shall not be
forgotten.

Quotation is to little purpose in a case like this.
Yet I must support my criticism with some extracts,

F F 2

436 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

selected to show in what particulars the realism of this
piece differs from that of the last The husband
enters to the wife. It is his first appearance, and these
are his first words :

Pox o' the last throw ! It made fi\t hundred angels
Vanish from my sight I 'm damned, I 'm damned ;
The angels have forsook me. Nay, it is
Certainly true ; for he that has no coin
Is damned in this world ; he is gone, he is gone.

The wife approaches. He turns round on her f

0 ! most punishment of all, I have a wife !

She pleads with him :

1 do entreat you, as you love your soul.
Tell me the cause of this your discontent.

He curses :

A vengeance strip thee naked ! thou art the cause.
The effect, the quality, the property ; thou, thou, thou !

Then he flings from the room, but reappears a moment
after, muttering. His beggary and the beggary of his
unloved family have taken hold upon his mind. * Base,
slavish, abject, filthy poverty ! ' * Money, money,
money ! ' ' Bastards, bastards, bastards ! ' This re-
iteration of the same words, and this renewal of the
same exasperating thoughts, seems meant to indicate
the man's insanity. His whole action is a paroxysm.
When his wife speaks, he interrupts her :

Have done, thou harlot,
Whom, though for fashion-sake I married,
I never could abide. Think'st thou thy words
Shall kill my pleasures ? Fall off to thy friends ;
Thou and thy bastards beg ; I will not bate
A whit in humour.

CHARACTER OF CALVERLEY. 437

Let her, if she wants to keep whole bones in her body,
turn her dowry into cash for him to squander :

I^t it be done ;
I was never made to be a looker-on,
A bawd to dice ; I '11 shake the drabs myself,
And make them yield ; I say, look it be done.

She goes to do his bidding :

Speedily, speedily !
I hate the very hour I chose a wife :
A trouble, trouble ! Three children, like three evils.
Hang on me. Fie, fie^ fie ! Strumpet and bastards !
Strumpet and bastards !

Perhaps this is enough. This serves, at least, to show
how the crude portrait of a God-abandoned ruffian
was dashed in. What follows is after the same
fashion. Stroke upon stroke, the artist stabs the
metal plate on which he etches, drowning it in aqua-
fortis till it froths. Prose takes the place of blank
verse in cooler moments of the victim's passion :

O thou confused man ! Thy pleasant sins have undone thee ;
thy damnation has beggared thee. That Heaven should say we must
not sin, and yet made women ! give our senses way to find pleasure,
which being found, confounds us ! Why should we know those
things so much misuse us ? O, would virtue had been forbidden !
We should then have proved all virtuous ; for 't is our blood to love
what we are forbidden. . . . 'T is done ; I have don't i' faith :
terrible, horrible misery ! How well was I left ! Very well, ver>'
well. My lands showed like a full moon round me ; but now the
moon 's in the last quarter — waning, waning ; and I am mad to think
that moon was mine ; mine and my father's, and my forefathers' ;
generations, generations ! Down goes the house of us ; down, down
it sinks. Now is the name a beggar ; begs in me. That name
which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me and my
I)ostcrity runs out In my seed five are made miserable besides

438 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

myself : my riot is now my brother's gaoler, my wife^s sighing, my
three boys' penury, and mine own confusion.

The only redeeming point in the whole ghastly
picture is that, tortured still with appetites and long-
ings, writhing on damnation s rack, this doomed man
has yet a thought, if not a tear, to spare his wife's,
his brothers, his sons ruin. But he is caught, like a
scotched asp, in the devil's fork. And when chance, at
this climax, offers one of his children to his sight, the
fury starts up, fanged to strike :

My eldest beggar !
Thou shalt not live to ask an usurer's bread,
To cry at a great man's gate, or follow.
Good your honour, by a coach ; no, nor your brother ;
T is charity to brain you.

And brain them both he does. First, the boy playing
with his ' top and scourge.' Next, the child in a
nurse's arms :

Whore, give me that boy ! . . .
Are you gossiping, you prating, sturdy quean ?
I '11 break your clamour with your neck ! Downstairs,
Tumble, tumble headlong. So :
The surest way to charm a woman's tongue.
Is — break her neck : a politician did it.

Here enters the wife, and snatches up the youngest
child :

Strumpet, let go the boy, let go the beggar.

To her * sweet husband,' * dear husband,' * good my
husband,' it is only * harlot,' * bastard,' *brat,' until he
stabs his boy, and wounds the mother in the breast.
A servant hastens in at the noise. ' Base slave, my

ATA D NESS AND MURDER, 439

vassal ! ' Down goes the groom, trampled on, bruised,
gored with riding spurs. The devil is up in the man,
and off he rides upon a saddled horse to find his last
child, feverish for further bloodshed. On the way his
nag falls, over-driven, stormed into stupidity. The
officers are after him, and he is caught. In the clutch
of justice, the devil in the man is still unquelled. He
snorts out curses. But they bring him home, and
confront him with his wounded wife :

W, O my sweet husband, my dear distressed husband,
Now my soul bleeds.

H, How now ? kind to me ? Did I not wound thee ?
Left thee for dead ?

W. Tut ! far, far greater wounds did my breast feel ;
Unkindness strikes a deeper wound than steel.
You have been still unkind to me.

H, Faith, and so I think I have.
I did my murders roughly out of hand.
Desperate and sudden ; but thou hast devised
A fine way now to kill me ; thou hast given mine eyes
Seven wounds apiece. Now glides the devil from me.
Departs at every joint, heaves up my nails :
O catch him, torments that were ne'er invented;
Bind him one thousand more, you blessed angels.
In that pit bottomless ! Let him not rise
To make men act unnatural tragedies ;
To spread into a father, and in fury
Make him his children's executioner.

W. O, my repentant husband !

H, O, my dear soul, whom I too much have wronged !

This exudation of the devil from the madman's
skin, departing by the passages of joints and nails, is
forcibly conceived. It must have appealed to an
audience who believed in diabolical possession, and
knew fiends customary exits. Yet something is missed
in the expression ; something which we find, how-

440 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

ever, further on, when the two dead children are
produced :

But you are playing in the angels' laps.
And will not look at me.

Then the wretch, delivered of his demon, outcast from
mercy, is led forth in silence to his punishment

What shall here be written about * Arden of
Feversham * ? This play preceded the two with which
I have just dealt by some years. Yet it combined
their characteristics in a style of far more ruthlessly
deliberate power, holding Calverley s passion in sub-
jection, preserving but transfiguring with conscious
art the frigid truth of villany in Captain Browne and
Mistress Anne. There is not one character in the
play which is not either detestable or despicable. And
yet the total impression is by no means one of un-
mixed loathing. The execution is too workmanly and
vigorous ; the peculiar type of bourgeois tragedy has
been too successfully realised for us to withhold our
admiration.

The tale of murder and adultery on which * Arden
of Feverham ' was founded, is written at considerable
length in Holinshed, and the play follows that narrative
with scrupulous fidelity. The last lines of the epilogue
are these :

Gentlemen, we hope you '11 pardon this naked tragedy,
Wherein no filed points are foisted in
To make it gracious to the ear or eye ;
For simple truth is gracious enough,
And needs no other points of glozing stuff.

'ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM: 441

A naked tragedy it is in all truth, and faithful down
to the least detail suggested by the text. Yet it is not
naked with the anatomical bareness, as of some flayed
figure, which we notice in the * Yorkshire Tragedy ; '
nor does it follow the narrative with the prosaic ser-
vility of * A Warning for Fair Women/ As Shakspere
dealt in his Roman tragedies with North's Plutarch,
so the author of * Arden ' deals with Holinshed. He
recasts each motive, retouches each sentence, revivifies
each character, by exercise of the imagination which
penetrates below the surface, divines the inner essence,
and reproduces in brief space the soul's life of the
subject. All this is done, however, in due keeping
with the style peculiar to domestic tragedy. * No filed
points ' of finished rhetoric, no ' points of glozing '
poetry, are foisted into the bare stuff of crime and pas-
sion ; nor is the simple impression of the tragedy
marred by matter meant to please the groundlings
ears. Possibly the Epilogue's appeal to gentlemen may
signify that the play was not intended for the common
stage. But, so far as I am aware, we know nothing
about the circumstances of its production and per-
formance.

* This Arden,' writes Holinshed, * was a man of a
tall and comely personage, and matched in marriage
with a gentlewoman, young, tall, and well-favoured of
shape and countenance, who chancing to fall in fami-
liarity with one Mosbie, a tailor by occupation, a black
swart man, servant to the Lord North, it happened
this Mosbie, upon some mistaking, to fall out with her ;
but she, being desirous to be in favour with him again,
sent him a pair of silver dice by one Adam Foule,

442 SHAKSPKRK'S PI^KDECKSSORS.

dwelling at the Flower-de-luce in Feversham. After
which he resorted to her again, and oftentimes lay in
Arden's house ; and although (as it was said)2Arden
perceived right well their mutual familiarity to be much
greater than their honesty, yet because he would not
offend her, and so lose the benefit he hoped to gain at
some of her friends' hands in bearing with her lewd-
ness, which he might have lost if he should have fallen
out with her, he was contented to wink at her filthy
disorder, and both permitted and also invited Mosbie
very often to lodge in his house. And thus it con-
tinued a good space before any practice was begun by
them against Master Arden. She at length, inflamed
in love with Mosbie, and loathing her husband,
wished, and after practised the means how to hasten
his end/

Thomas Arden, or more properly Arderne, was a
Kentish gentleman. His wife is said to have been a
daughter of Sir Edward North, created Baron in 1554.
Her name, as is natural, does not occur in published or
MS. pedigrees of the Earls of Guilford ; but if she was
Sir Edward's daughter, she was also sister to Sir
Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch. Thomas
Mosbie, or Morsby, as the name should be written,
began life as a tailor, entered the service of Sir Edward
North, and rose to the stewardship of his household.
The references in the tragedy to Alice's noble birth
and powerful relatives, and to Mosbie s former occu-
pation, are frequent Mosbie gives Arden the coup de
grdce with a * pressing iron of fourteen pounds', weight,'
which he carried at his girdle. This was an implement
of his trade. When Arden draws Mosbie s sword from

CHARACTER OF ARDEN, 443

the scabbard and wrests it from him, he taunts the
tailor thus :

So, sirrah, you may not wear a sword !

The statute makes against artificers.

I warrant that, I do ! Now use your bodkin,

Your Spanish needle, and your pressing iron !

For this shall go with me ; and mark my words.

You goodman botcher !

In the tragedy Arden is drawn from the first as a man
aware of his wife's adultery :

Love-letters passed 'twixt Mosbie and my wife,
And they have privy meetings in the town :
Nay, on his finger did I spie the ring,
Which at our marriage-day the priest put on.

The indignity of the situation stings him to the quick :

Ay, but to dote on such an one as he,
Is monstrous, Franklin, and intolerable !

Yet he puts up with it, because he cannot do without
his wife :

For dear I hold her love, as dear as heaven.

He knows that the pair have resolved to murder him,
put poison in his milk, set cut-throats on him. Still he
entreats Mosbie to take up lodging in his house, and
leaves him there when he goes to London. He sees
Alice with her arms round the man's neck, and hears
them call him cuckold. Yet he makes all smooth, and
persists in pressing Mosbie, apparently against his
wife's will, to sup and play with him. The dramatist's
conception of his character is, that uxoriousness has
blinded him :

He whomj^the devil drives, must go perforce.
Poor'gentleman !_how soon he is bewitched !

444 SHAKSPERK'S PREDECESSORS.

Furthermore, following the Chronicle, he makes avarice
a main point of the portrait. Alice says :

My saving husband hoards up bags of gold,
To make my children rich.

A certain Greene, whom he has defrauded of some
abbey lands by obtaining a Chancery grant of them,
exclaims :

Desire of wealth is endless in his mind,
And he is greedy, gaping still for gain ;
Nor cares he though young gentlemen do beg,
So he may scrape and hoard up in his jKJUch.

One Reede, deprived by him unjustly of a plot of
ground, meets and curses him not long before the
murder :

That plot of ground which thou detain^st from me,

I speak it in an agony of spirit,

Be ruinous and fatal unto thee !

Either there be butchered by thy dearest friends,

Or else be brought for men to wonder at.

Or thou or thine miscarry in that place.

Or there run mad and end thy cursed days !

This avarice, combined with the doting passion for his
wife, brings about his ruin. He persists in trusting
Mosbie and Alice. They work on Greene s resentment.
Greene hires the murderers, Black Will and Shagbag.
When Arden has been killed, his dead body is flung
out upon Reede's meadow. In this way the dramatist
has contrived to draw the fatal net around the husband
by the means of his two base qualities. It must, how-
ever, be regarded as somewhat singular that, while he
followed Holinshed so closely, he dropped one motive

DEFECTIVE PORTRAITURE, 445

suggested in the passage I have quoted above. * Be-
cause he would not offend her, and so lose the benefit he
hoped to gain at some of her friends hands in bearing
with her lezvdness' This, and this alone, makes the
real Arderne's contemptible compliance intelligible.
The omission of this enfeebles the dramatic Arden, and
blurs the outline of his character, in which neither
uxorious passion nor avarice is forcibly enough accen-
tuated to explain his conduct. It is, of course, pos-
sible, the North family being at that time both powerful
and noble, that the playwright felt himself precluded
from insisting on a motive which might have been
construed into a scandalum 7}tagnatumy and that he
unwillingly abandoned what would have enabled him
to raise the dramatic interest and intensity of Arden's
character. Also he may not have chosen to paint his
victim-hero in colours so revolting that the most in-
dulgent of audiences must have regarded his murder,
not as a martyrdom, but as a merited punishment
But, while avoiding this rock, he has drifted into
the most serious weakness which is discernible in the
character-drawing of the play. It is impossible to
take much interest in this clay figure.

Mosbie, the lover, is more powerfully realised.
We see in him one of the basest curs an artist ever
deigned to draw with touch on touch of deepening
degradation. He is a coward even in his love, dragged
forward less by passion than by the imperious will of
his paramour. When Arden wrests his sword and
brands him on the face with infamy, he only falters :

Ah, Master Arden, you have injured me.
I do appeal to God, and to the world.

44^ SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

He is a coward in the execution of his crime, seeking
to do the trick by poisoned pictures, poison in the cup,
a poisoned crucifix, rather than by sheer steel ; and
blaming Alice for audacity when she discovers a proper
instrument in Greene. He is a traitor in thought to
his mistress and accomplices. When they are all chin-
deep in stratagems and murderous plots he considers,
in a long soliloquy, how he shall secure himself against
them in the future. Greene, Michael, and the Painter
must be brought to ' pluck out each other's throat.'
The woman must be killed :

Yet Mistress Arden lives ; but she 's myself,
And holy Church-rites make us two not one.
But what for that ? I may not trust you, Alice !
You have supplanted Arden for my sake.
And will extirpen me to plant another.
T is fearful sleeping in a serpent's bed ;
And I will cleanly rid my hands of her.

When they quarrel, his unspeakable sordidness of soul
bursts out :

Go, get thee gone, a copesmate for thy hinds !
I am too good to be thy favourite.

Alice's real retribution is that, passion-blinded, she

has to feel the fangs of such a hound. When she

humbles herself to beg for pardon, he returns the
speech of her despair with snarls of hating irony :

O no ! I am a base artificer !
My wings are feathered for a lowly flight.
Mosbie ? Fie, no, not for a thousand pound I
Make love to you ? Why, 't is unpardonable !
We beggars must not breathe where gentles are.

The touch of not for a thousand pound is rare.

CHARACTER OF MOSBtE. 447

Alice never for a moment thought of money. It is
the churl, who expresses the extreme of scorn by
hyperboles of cash. When they make peace, his last
word has a sinister double meaning. She bids him
come into the house. He answers :

Ay, to the gates of death, to follow thee !

There is no redeeming touch in Mosbie. He is
wounded in an unsuccessful attack on Arden. Alice
cannot bear the sight :

Sweet Mosbie, hide thy arm, it kills my heart

Listen to his sneering response :

Ay, Mistress Arden, fAis is your favour.

The murder has been accomplished. His only thought
is for his own safety :

Tell me, sweet Alice, how shall I escape ?
Until to-morrow, sweet Alice, now farewell,
And see you confess nothing in any case.

He is brought up together with the other criminals for
sentence before the Mayor. At the sight and voice
of Alice he bursts into foul-mouthed abuse :

How long shall I live in this hell of grief?
Convey me from the presence of that strumpet

The last recorded utterance of his egotism is :

Fie upon women !

By the side of Mosbie, Captain Browne and even
Calverley are honest fellows.

The subordinate characters are scarcely less intoler-
able ; but the dramatist has contrived to indicate various

44^ SIIAKSPERKKS PREDECESSORS.

shades of dastardy and villany in painting this unin-
viting gallery of scoundrels. There is not one but is
an actual or potential murderer — Michael, Greene,
Black Will, Shagbag, and the Painter Clarke. Michael
says :

For I will rid mine elder brother away,
And then the farm of liocton is mine own.

The Painter boasts of his skill in preparing poisons,
and unctuously approves of Alice's resolve. Her
love for Mosbie is enough to justify her in his mind :

Let it suffice, I know you love him well,
And fain would have your husband made away :
Wherein, trust me, you show a noble mind,
That rather than you '11 live with him you hate.
You '11 venture life, and die with hnn you love.
The like will I do for my Susan's sake.

Greene speaks to much the same effect, when he
accepts Alice's challenge to despatch her husband.
Black Will is the very Cambyses of cut-throats, revel-
ling in bloodshed for its own delicious sake : ^

My fingers itch to be at the peasant ! Ah, that I might be sA
a-work thus through the year, and that nuirder would grow to an
occupation, that a man might without danger of law !

Shagbag is not so fluent of speech ; but some of his
condensed utterances reveal an even more dogged de-
light in cruelty :

I cannot paint my valour out with words :
But give me place and opportunity.
Such mercy as the starve n lioness,
When she is dry-sucked of her eager young,
Shows to the prey that next encounters her.
On Arden so much i)ity would I take.

^ There is a Shaksperian touch is this quotation, that murder would
grow to an occupation^ &c. This is humorous in the genuine vein.

BLACK WILL AND SHAG RAG, 449

His form of registering a vow to be revenged on one
who has played false with him, is characteristic :

And let me never draw a sword again,
Nor prosper in the twilight, cock-shut light,
When I would fleece the wealthy passenger.
But lie and languish in a loathsome den,
Hated, and spit at by the goers- by,
And in that death may die unpitied,
If I the next time that I meet the slave.
Cut not the nose from off the coward's face,
And trample on it for his villany.

It must not, however, be understood that the play-
wright has contrived to humanise either of these cut-
throats in the finer sense of the word. They remain
stage-murderers, painted from the outside, rather than
portrayed with personal and psychological differences.
One scene, in which the two ruffians bully * murder-
ous Michael ' into abject subjection and submission to
their will — a bullying blent of English schoolboy and
Italian bravo — is effective :

You deal too mildly with the j^easant ;
[Black Will says this in a loud aside to his confederate Shagbag.

Thus it is : [Nouf speaks to Michael.
T is known to us that you love Mosbie's sister ;
We know besides that you have ta'en your oath.
To further Mosbie to your mistress' bed,
And kill your master for his sister's sake.
Now, sir, a poorer coward than yourself
Was never fostered in the coast of Kent.
How comes it then that such a knave as you
Dare swear a matter of such consequence ?

One sees the brawny swashbuckler swaggering up with
moustachios bristling and fist on dagger, close to the
country clown. Their breaths mingle. Then he
comes to threats :

G G

450 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Tush, give me leave, there is no more but this :

[^Spoken as ab<we in a loud aside to Shagbag, after
7vhich he addresses himself again to Michaeu
Sith thou hast sworn, we dare discover all ;
And haddest thou, or shouldst thou utter it.
We have devised a complot under hand.
Whatever shall betide to any of usy
To send thee roundly to the pit of hell.
And therefore thus : I am the very man.
Marked in my birth-hour by the destinies.
To give an end to Arden's life on earth ;
Thou but a member, but to whet the knife,
Whose edge must search the closet of his breast
Thy office is but to appoint the place.
And train thy master to his tragedy ;
Mine to perform it, when occasion serves.
Then be not nice, but here devise with us,
How, and what way, we may conclude his death.

The rising of the style to rhetoric, the braggadocio
allusion to the destinies, the relegation of Michael to
a second place in the action, and the hectoring trucu-
lence of the bravo's self-glorification, are sufficient to
lay flat a meaner knave than Michael is. He goes
down at the bully s blow ; but being a coward to the
core, he is overstrung and unnerved by the attack.
Having promised to do Black WilFs bidding and leave
his master's lodging unlocked at night, he gives way,
just at the fatal moment, to a fit of spiritual horror.
* Even physical fear,* as Mr. Swinburne writes, ' be-
comes tragic, and cowardice itself no physical infirmity,
but rather a terrible passion,* in the Michael of this
shuddering soliloquy :

Conflicting thoughts, encamped in my breast,
Awake me with the echo of their strokes ;
And I, a judge to censure either side,
Can give to neither wishM victory.
My master's kindness pleads to me for life,

MICHAEL. 451

With just demand, and I must grant it him.
My mistress she hath forced me with an oath,
For Susan's sake, the which I may not break.
For that is nearer than a master's love.
That grim-faced fellow, pitiless Black Will,
And Shakebag, stem in bloody stratagem —
Two rougher villains never lived in Kent —
Have sworn my death if I infringe my vow ;
A dreadful thing to be considered of.
Methinks I see them with their bolstered hair,
Staring and grinning in thy gentle face,
And in their ruthless hands their daggers drawn.
Insulting o'er thee with a peck of oaths,
Whilst thou submissive, pleading for relief.
Art mangled by their ireful instruments !
Methinks I hear them ask where Michael is.
And pitiless Black Will cries : * Stab the slave,
The peasant will detect the tragedy ! '
The wrinkles in his foul death-threatening face
Gape open wide like graves to swallow men.
My death to him is but a merriment,
And he will murder me to make him sport.
He comes, he comes ; ah, Master Franklin, help !
Call up the neighbours, or we are but dead !

Such, then, are the minor characters ; Lord Cheyne,
Bradshaw (an innocent straw, whirled down to death on
fate's eddy), Richard Reede, and Arden s shadow, the
prologising and epilogising Franklin, are but episodical.
But the real strength of the play does not lie in the
ignoble Mosbie or the pitiful Arden, in the swaggering
cut-throats or their sordid accomplices. What gives
value to the piece is the portrait of Mistress Alice — the
adulterous gentlewoman, the bourgeois Clytemnestra,
the Lady Macbeth of county family connections. She
detaches herself after a far more impressive fashion
from the reptile swarm around her. It is not that
she is ethically estimable. Far from it But she is
morally superior to all the men around her — pluckier,

G G 2

452 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

more thoroughly possessed by passion. Her fixed
will carries the bloody business through ; and when she
falls, she falls not utterly ignoble.

The author s method of unveiling, developing, and
variously displaying this unscrupulous and passion-
ridden woman's character, demands minute analysis.
Unlike all the playwrights of his time, with the excep-
tion of Shakspere and Marlowe, he plunges into the
action without the aid of dumb show or chorus, and
without an awkwardly explanatory first scene. The
actors themselves, in natural, self-revealing dialogue,
expose the strains of character and passion out of
which the plot is spun by their continuous movement
to one point — the murder on which everything con-
verges. Before Alice appears, Arden's opening con-
versation with his friend, Franklin, has informed us
that he considers her a faithless wife, and that his
heart is divided between shame, hatred, and a cling-
ing love. She enters in the early morning light, and
the first words he utters display her guilt as in a shadow-
picture cast by her own dreaming fancy on his con-
sciousness :

This night, sweet Alice, thou hast killed my heart :
1 heard thee call on Mosbie in thy slee[).

And not only this :

Ay, but you started up, and suddenly,
Instead of him, caught me about the neck.

Our mind reverts for a moment to the scene in which
honest I ago rouses Othello's suspicion of Cassio by
the use of precisely the same motive. The next point
is communicated in her own soliloquy :

MISTRESS ALICE ARDEX. 453

V.VG, noon he means to take horse, and away :
Sweet news is this ! Oh, that some airy spirit
Would, in the shape and likeness of a horse,
Gallop with Arden 'cross the ocean.
And throw him from his back into the waves !
Sweet Mosbie is the man that hath my heart ;
And he usur|)s it, having nought but this,
'i'hat I am tied to him by marriage.
I^ove is a god, and marriage is but words.
And therefore Mosbie's title is the rest.

Her passion already involves the desire for Arden's
death, and meddles with casuistical excuses. News
reaches her of Mosbie's arrival in the town. This
spark sets the smouldering fire in her ablaze.

As surely shall he die,
As I abhor him, and love only thee !

We now know that Arden's murder is chiefly a ques-
tion of time ; and when the servant Michael enters,
we are not surprised to find her working on his appe-
tite, and luring him to do the deed. The scene has
not been interrupted, except by entrances and exits
of minor persons, when Mosbie in his turn appears—
with faint speeches and a hang-dog countenance. He
has the air of a man who, having had his way, would
fain drop a dangerous love adventure. But the woman
will not let him go thus :

Did we not both
Decree to murder Arden in the night?
The heavens can witness, and the world can tell.
Before I saw that falsehood look of thine,
'Fore I was tangled with thy 'ticing speech,
Arden to me was dearer than my soul !
And shall be still ! Base peasant, get thee gone,
And boast not of thy conquest over me,
Gotten by witchcraft and mere sorcery !

454 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

For what hast thou to countenance my love,
Being descended of a noble house,
And matched already with a gentleman.
Whose servant thou mayst be ? And so, farewell

Had Mosbie found her irresolute, the tragedy would
here have ended. But the fire that sparkles from
her heats his chillier blood, and wakes what little
manhood lingers in him. He reiterates his former
vows, and enters at once into Alice s schemes for de-
spatching Arden by the shortest way. The next scene,
which serves to illustrate her temper, is when Arden
suspects the poison in his broth, and she turns railing
round on him :

There 's nothing I can do, can please your taste ;
You were best to say I would have poisoned you.

This teaches us to know the woman well. She
has the courage of her criminality so fully that she
dares suggest it, holding in her hands the poisoned
bowl, and knowing that her husband has detected her.
When Mosbie and she are alone together, this is her
comment on the incident :

This powder was too gross and palpable.

Her lover s qualms have returned. Has he not sworn
to leave her ? Were it not better to desist }

Tush, Mosbie, oaths are words, and words are wind.
And wind is mutable.

She will not let him go ; but she feels now that the
weight of the affair is on her hands, and that he must
be dragged along by her superior energy. There-
fore, in the next decisive scene, she works on Greene's

ALICE AND MOSBIE, 455

cupidity and thirst for vengeance, as she had previously
worked on Michael's and the Painters lust. Mosbie
dreads her desperate audacity, as indeed he has good
reason to do ; for a further point in her character, its
recklessness, is disclosed when she makes him take up
his abode in her house, Arden being absent :

Mosbie, you know who *s master of my heart,
As well may be the master of the house.

These lines end the first act. The second act
brings other agents into play, but adds nothing to our
conception of Alice. In the third act occurs the finest
scene of the whole drama. Twice have the assassins
hired by Greene — Black Will and Shagbag — failed in
their attempts on Arden. The strain of expectation
makes Alice waver for one moment. In an interval
of this yielding to better impulses, she comes on
Mosbie. The scene is laid in a room of her own
house, and she holds a prayer-book in her hands :

Alice. It is not love, that loves to murder love,

Mosbie, How mean you that ?

A, Thou know'st how dearly Arden loved me.

M, And then ?

A, And then— conceal the rest, for 'tis too bad,
Lest that my words be carried with the wind,
And published in the world to both our shames.
I i)ray thee, Mosbie, let our spring time wither,
Our har\'est else vrill yield but loathsome weeds.
Forget, I pray thee, what hath passed betwixt us.
For now I blush, and tremble at the thoughts.

AL What, are you changed ?

A, Ay, to my former happy life again :
From title of an odious strumpet's name.
To honest Arden's wife ! not Arden's honest wife !
Ha, Mosbie, 't is thou hast rifled me of that,
And made me slanderous to all my kin :

456 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Even in my forehead is thy name engraven —
A mean artificer ;— that low-bom name !
I was bewitched !- Woe worth the hapless hour,
And all the causes that enchanted me !

Never again, until the very last scenes of the tra-
gedy, shall we hear such words of angry conscience
and repentance fall from this woman's lips. Mosbie,
who just before her entrance had been planning how
to rid himself of her, now foams a torrent of abuses
out :

Nay, if thou ban, let me breathe curses forth ;
And if you stand so nicely on your fame,
Let me repent the credit I have lost.

And so on through twenty-three more lines, each one
of which falls like a lash upon her shoulders. Instead
of confirming her in the repentant mood, his brutality
drives her good angel away, and brings her back sub-
missive to his lure :

Nay, hear me speak, Mosbie, a word or two :

1 11 bite my tongue if it speak bitterly.

Look on me, Mosbie, or 1 11 kill myself ;

Nothing shall hide me from thy stormy look.

If thou cry war, there is no peace for me ;

I will do penance for offending thee.

And bum this prayer-book, where I here use

The holy word that had converted me.

See, Mosbie, I will tear away the leaves,

And all the leaves, and in this golden cover

Shall thy sweet phrases and thy letters dwell,

And thereon will I chiefly meditate.

And hold no other sect, but such devotion.

Wilt thou not look ? Is all thy love o'erwhelmed ?

Wilt thou not hear ? What malice stops thine ears ?

Why si)eak'st thou not ? What silence ties thy tongue ?

Thou hast been sighted, as the eagle is,

And heard as quickly as the fearful hare,

And spoke as smoothly as an orator,

VEHEMENCE OF PASSION. 457

When I have bid thee hear or see or speak :
And art thou sensible in none of these ?
Weigh all my good turns with this little fault,
And I deserve not Mosbie's muddy looks.
A fence of trouble is not thickened, still ;
Be clear again, I '11 no more trouble thee.

Ugly as Mrs. Arden has been painted, this terrible
altercation scene — more terrible even than that in
which Ottima and Sebald, in Browning s * Pippa
Passes,* confront each other after the murder of her
husband — has the effect of raising her a little in our
estimation. The tigress-woman, spiteful in her peni-
tence, becomes gentle in the renewal of her love ; and
this love, unhallowed, bloody as it is, explains her
future conduct. She is in the clutch of Venus Libi-
tina henceforth till the hour of her death. Rising at
one later moment almost into poetry, she excuses
Arden's murder thus :

Nay, he must leave to live, that we may love.
May live, may love ; for what is life but love ?
And love shall last as long as life remains.
And life shall end, before my love depart

Could the selfishness of passion, identifying itself

with existence, brushing away the life that stands

between anticipation and fruition like a fly, be more

condensed than in these monosyllables ? But the

demon which rules her finds even readier utterance in

crudity and coarseness. Arden becomes for her * my

husband Hornsby.* She exposes him to the disgrace

of looking at her locked in Mosbie's arms ; and hoping

him upon the point of death, flings this aside to scorn

him :

Ay, with a sugared kiss let them untwine !

458 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

When at the end he is caught in her last trap,
throttled with the towel in his own arm-chair, struck
down by Mosbie s pressing iron, stabbed by Shagbag's
knife, she snatches up the dagger :

What, groan'st thou ? Nay, then give me the weapon !
Take this for hindering Mosbie's love and mine.

What did Lady Macbeth say ? * Give me the dagger !'
But no sooner has he fallen on the rushes in his blood
— blood that * cleaves to the ground, and will not out,'
blood that * with my nails I '11 scrape away,' blood that
'here remains' to sicken her, what though 'I blush not
at my husband's death ' — in this horrid moment she
springs up once more in revolt, a tigress, at the throat
of Mosbie :

'T was thou that made me murder him.

Through the hurry and confusion of the closing scenes
her high-strung courage bei^ins to fail. * Here is
nought but fear ! * Yet the cowardice of others brings
her to herself again. A servant says that while they
dragged the body to the field it snowed — * our footsteps
will be spied.'

Peace, fool ! the snow will cover them again.

Against the neighbours who come crowding in, she
bears a bold front, rapping excuses out, fencing
desperately with their rapiers of proof. Then they
force her to look upon Arden's corpse, and she dis-
solves in penitence as passionate as was her fierce
desire :

Arden, sweet husband ! what shall I say ?

The more I sound his name, the more it bleeds ;

This blood condemns me, and in gushing forth

POWERFUL PORTRAITURE OF ALICE, 459

Speaks as it falls, and asks me, why I did it !

Forgive me, Arden, I repent me now,

And, would my death save thine, thou shouldst not die.

Rise up, sweet Arden, and enjoy thy love.

And frown not on me, when we meet in heaven.

In heaven I '11 love thee, though on earth I did not.

From this mood she does not return. In the con-
demnation scene she tries to shield Bradshaw, falsely
implicated in the crime ; responds quietly to Mosbie's
insults, and disappears from sight with these words :

Let my death make amends for all my sin.

Those who give * Arden of Feversham * to Shakspere
— ^which I am loth in the absence of any external evi-
dence to do — have some warranty for their opinion in
this character of Alice. Speaking of * Edward III.'
Mr. Ward suggests that * Shakspere's gallery of female
characters . . . seems incomplete without the addition
of the Countess of Salisbury.' Personally, I could well
spare the Countess from the sisterhood of Imogen and
Desdemona. And though Alice is not needed in that
gallery, I should be more inclined to recognise in her,
with Mr. Swinburne, the * eldest born of that group
to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right
of weird sisterhood.'

* Arden of Feversham ' is marked by something
terribly impressive in the slow, unerring tread of
assassination, baulked, but persevering, marching like
a fate to its accomplishment. Arden's knowledge of
his wife's infidelity and murderous designs, his neglect
of signs, words, omens, warning dreams, increases the
tragic effect. He is like a fascinated man, the victim
of Greek Ate, sliding open-eyed on the descent to hell.

46o SHAh'SPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

If anything could be said in commendation of the bye-
scenes in * A Warning for Fair Women/ much more
and much higher praise must be bestowed on the
successive episodes which lead up to the climax of
this tragedy. There are no bye-scenes — none that are
not really needed by the exposition. And how naturally
is each presented — the chance meeting of Greene and
Bradshaw with Black Will and Shagbag on the road
to Gravesend ; the Walk in Pauls, and the prentice
letting down his shutter upon Black Wills head ; the
night in Aldersgate. when Arden and Franklin are
summoned from the house-porch to their beds by
Michael, and the murderers brawl outside ; the quarrel
and ambush on Rainham Down ; the cheery passage of
Lord Cheiny and his men ; the fog at the ferry ; the
curse delivered by Dick Reede ; Arden s dream, and
Franklin's interrupted story ; the skirniish on the
heath ; and lastly, the elaborate scene in Arden s
parlour (where, they say, the arms of North may still
be seen in painted glass upon the windows), the game
at backgammon, and the sudden inrush of the mur-
derers upon the captured man !

VI.

In the prologue to * A Woman Killed with Kind-
ness,' Heywood makes the players say : ' Our Muse —
our poet's dull and earthy Muse — is bent

Upon a barren subject, a bare scene/

These modest words strike the keynote to a tragedy,
which, while it is a masterpiece of realism, contrasts

'A WOMAX KILLED WITH KLYDNESS.' 461

agreeably with the three preceding plays. Here,
instead of the police-court daylight of * A Warning
for Fair Women/ instead of the lurid glare of * A
Yorkshire Tragedy/ instead of the furnace flame of
* Arden/ we have to light us on our way the soft
illumination, as of summer lightning, shed by a tender-
hearted Christian artist's sympathy. The play is
steeped in feeling, touched with gentle yieldings to
emotion, resolutions of cruelty into love-penitence,
reconciliations of the wronged and wronging, which
diffuse a mellow radiance over the homely subject, the
unadorned scene.

The story may be briefly told. Mr. Frankford, a
country gentleman of good birth and fortune, marries
the sister of Sir Francis Acton, a lady of rare ac-
complishments, famed throughout the county for her
skill in music. A day or two after the wedding he
receives into his household, on the footing of familiar
friend or housemate, a young man of broken means,
but of agreeable manners, called Wendoll. They live
together happily till Wendoll, trusted to the full by
Frankford, takes advantage of his absence to seduce
the wife. Nicholas, an old servant of the family, has
always disliked the interloper. With the instinct of a
faithful dog, he watches Wendoll closely, discovers the
intrigue, and informs Frankford of his dishonour.
Frankford obtains ocular proof of his wife's guilt, and
punishes her by sending her to live alone, but at ease,
in a manor that belongs to him. There she pines
away, and dies at last, after a reconciliation with her
husband and her relatives. There is an underplot, or
rather second talc, connected by slight but sufficient

462 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

threads with the main action. I do not think it has
been remarked that this subordinate drama is derived
from Illicini's Sienese Novella of the courteous Salim-
beni (see * Renaissance in Italy,' vol. v. p. 99). Such,
however, is the case. But Hey wood, with his rare
knowledge and feeling for the details of English life,
re cast the Italian motive and clothed it in a garb of
homely realism, so that it passes now for a finished
picture of Elizabethan society. Whether Mrs. Frank-
ford s tragedy had a basis of fact, or whether, like the
underplot, it was adopted — as I think most probable —
from romance, or invented by the poet, we do not
know.

The chief interest of the play centres in the pure,
confiding, open-hearted character of Frankford. His
blithe contentment during the first weeks of marriage,,
and the generosity with which he shares his home with
Wendoll, form a touching prelude to the suspicions,
indignantly repelled at first, which grow upon him after
he has weighed the tale of his wife's infidelity related
by Nicholas :

Thou hast killed me with a weapon, whose sharp point

Hath pricked (juitc through and through my shivering heart :

Drops of cold sweat sit dangling on my hairs ;

And I am plunged into strange agonies !

What didst thou say ? If any word that touched

His credit or her reputation,

It is as hard to enter my belief,

As Dives into heaven.

Nicholas only repeats that he has nothing to gain,

everything perhaps to lose, by the disclosure. Yet,

* I saw, and I have said.' This saps the husband's
confidence.

MR, FRANKFORD, 463

T is probable : though blunt, yet he is honest

Though I durst pawn my life, and on their faith

Hazard the dear salvation of my soul,

Yet in my trust I may be too secure.

May this be true ? O, may it ? Can it be ?

Is it by any wonder possible ?

Man, woman, what thing mortal can we trust.

When friends and bosom wives prove so unjust ?

Frankford, still doubtful, resolves to learn the truth,
if possible, by actual discovery. Here is interposed
an admirable, if somewhat artificial scene, in which
the husband and wife, with WendoU and another gen-
tleman, play at cards. Their dialogue is a long double
entendre^ skilfully revealing the tortures of a jealous
mind which puts misinterpretations upon every casual
word. When they rise from the card-table, Frankford
instructs his servant to prepare duplicate keys for all
the bedrooms. He then causes a message to be de-
livered, calling him from home on a dark and stormy
evening, and sets out with Nicholas, intending to
return at midnight, unnoticed and unexpected. His
hesitation on the threshold of his wife's chamber is
one of the finest turning points in the dramatic pre-
sentation :

A general silence hath surprised the house ;
And this is the last door. Astonishment,
Fear, and amazement beat upon my heart.
Even as a madman beats upon a drum.
O keep my eyes, you heavens, before I enter.
From any sight that may transfix my soul :
Or, if there be so black a spectacle,
O strike mine eyes stark blind ; or if not so.
Lend me such patience to digest my grief,
That I may keep this white and virgin hand
From any violent outrage or red murder I

464 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

At last he summons up courage to enter, but draws
back immediately :

Oh me unhappy ! I have found them King

Close in each other's arms, and fast asleep.

But that I would not damn two precious souls.

Bought with my Sa\iour s blood, and send them, laden

With all their scarlet sins upon their backs,

Unto a fearful judgment, their two lives

Had met ujxjn my rapier !

Then, with a passionate stretching forth of his desire
toward the impossible, which reveals the whole depth
of his tenderness, he cries :

0 Gf>d ! O Cxod ! that it were possible

To undo things done ; to call back yesterday !

That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass.

To untell the days, and to redeem these hours !

Or that the sun

Could, rising from the West, draw his coach backward ;

Take from the account of time so many minutes.

Till he had all these seasons called again.

These minutes, and these actions done in them.

Even from her first offence ; that I might take her

As spotless as an angel in my arms !

But oh ! I talk of things imjjossible.

And cast beyond the mooa God give me patience,

For I will in and wake them.

Wendoll rushes from the room in his night-dress ;
and Frankford, pursuing him with drawn sword, is
stopped by a woman servant :

1 thank thee, maid ; thou, like an angeVs hand,
Hast stayed me from a bloody sacrifice.

It is quite consistent with Frankfords character,
with his Christianity, with the prayer he uttered before
entering the bedroom, and with his subsequent action,
that he should spare the adulterer. Hey wood has,

SCENE IN THE BEDCHAMBER. 465

however, saved this mercifulness from contemptibility
by showing him for one moment in the act to strike.
The immediately ensuing scene between Frankford
and his conscience-stricken wife, is deeply touching.
She grovels on the ground, crying, swooning. He
seems to stand looking down on her :

Spare thou thy tears, for I will weep for thee :
And keep thy countenance, for 1 11 blush for thee.
Now, I protest, I think, 'tis I am tainted;
For I am most ashamed ; and 't is more hard
For me to look upon thy guilty face,
Than on the sun's clear brow.

Then he asks, what can she urge in her defence.
Nothing, she replies ; and she expects, as she deserves,
nothing but instant death ; only let him kill her without
mutilation. Then he bids her rise :

Fr. My God, with patience arm me ! Rise, nay rise ;
And I '11 debate with thee. Was it for want
Thou play'dst the strumpet ? Wast thou not supplied
With every pleasure, fashion, and new toy,
Nay even beyond my calling ?

Afrs. F, I was.

Fr, Was it then disability in me ?
Or in thine eye seemed he a properer roan ?

Mrs. F O, no.

Fr. Did not I lodge thee in my bosom ?
Wear thee in my heart ?

Mrs. F. You did.

Fr. I did indeed ; witness my tears, I did.
Cio, bring my infants hither. O Nan, O Nan ;
If neither fear of shame, regard of honour.
The blemish of my house, nor my dear love
Could have withheld thee from so lewd a fact,
Vet for these infants, these young harmless souls,
On whose white brows thy shame is charactered,
And grows in greatness as they wax in years : —
Look but on them, and melt away in tears.

H H

466 SNA KS PERK'S PREDECESSORS.

This scene exactly suits the genius of Heywood.
Its passion is simple and homefelt. Its tenderness is
human and manly. Each question asked by Frai^-
ford is such as a wronged husband has the right to
ask. Each answer given by the wife is broken in
mere monosyllables, more eloquent than protestation.
We feel the truth of the whole situation poignantly,
because no word is strained or far-fetched, because
Frankford in his justice avoids rhetoric, and in his
mercy shows no sentimental weakness ; finally because,
in the very depth of his grief, he still can call his wife
by her pet name. Me then leaves the room :

Stand up, stand up, I will do nothing rashly :

I will retire a while into my study.

And thou shalt hear thy sentence presently.

When he returns, it is to pronounce the verdict of
exile from her home, himself, her children :

So, farewell, Nan ; for we will henceforth be
As we had never seen, ne'er more shall see.

One of the most delicate touches which round off
the character of Frankford, is his anxiety to clear the
house of everything that may remind him of his wife,
when she is gone. He searches it :

O, sir, to see that nothing may be left

That ever was my wife's : I loved her dearly,

And when I do but think of her unkindness.

My thoughts are all in hell ; to avoid which torment,

I would not have a bodkin or a cuff,

A bracelet, necklace, or rcbato-wirc,

Nor anything that ever was called hers

T,eft me, by which I might remember her.

Mrs, frankford, 467

His servant spies her lute, flung in a corner :

Her lute ? O God ! upon this instrument

Her fingers have ran quick division,

Sweeter than that which now divides our hearts.

These frets have made me pleasant, that have now

Frets of my heart-strings made. O Master Cranwell,

Oft hath she made this melancholy wood,

Now mute and dumb for her disastrous chance,

Speak sweetly many a note, sound many a strain

To her own ravishing voice ! —

Post with it after her. Now nothing 's left

Even the conceits and play on words in this pas-
sage are not frigid ; so natural and so intense is the
emotion which penetrates the speaker's mood. Nicholas
is sent with the lute after Mrs. Frankford, who is now
on her way to the manor house appointed for her exile.
When she looks on it, she says :

I know the lute ; oft have I sung to thee ;
We both are out of tune, both out of time.

Then she bids it be dashed to pieces against the
carriage wheels :

Go, break this lute upon my coach's wheel.
As the last milsic that I e'er shall make ;
Not as my husband's gift, but my farewell
To all earth's joys.

Music, it will be remembered, was one of the poor
lady's chief accomplishments. During the gaiety of
her marriage morning, a light-hearted guest had said :

Her own hand
Can teach all strings to speak in their best grace.
From the shrill'st treble to the hoarsest bass.

Mrs. Frankford is no Guinevere ; nor, again, like
Alice in * Arden of Feversham,' is she steeled and

H H 3

468 SMAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

blinded by an overwhelming passion. Hey wood fails
to realise her character completely, drawing, as else-
where in his portraits of women, a dim and vacillating
picture. She changes too suddenly from love for her
newly wedded husband to a weak compliance with
Wendoll ; she falls rather through helplessness than
any explicable emotion :

\Vhat shall I say ?
My soul is wandering, and hath lost her way.
Oh, Master Wendoll, oh !

This is how she meets and yields to his solicitations.
It is only after the intrigue has been carried on for
some while, and when Frankford has discovered her
in the act, that she shows signs of a deeply troubled
conscience. Then, with no less suddenness, she
changes round to the remorse which preys upon her
life. In order to preserve the respect and sympathy
which he claims for her at last, Heywood ought to
have better motivirt her fault.

Wendoll is drawn more powerfully, yet not with
wholly satisfactory firmness. It is as though, in both
these guilty characters, Heywood had wished to prove
how much of misery and crime may spring from weak-
ness and inconsequence. Viewed in this light, his art,
though it lacks something of dramatic impressiveness,
is realistic in a subtler sense than many harder and
more brilliant studies. Some of the finest poetry in
the play is put into Wendoll s mouth ; both when he
wavers between the sense of duty to his benefactor and
the love which invades him like a rising tide, swallow-
ing the landmarks set to warn him off that perilous

WENDOLL. 469

ground ; and also when he urges his suit at last on
Mrs. Frankford. The following soliloquy paints the
combat of his passion and his conscience :

I am a villain if I apprehend

But such a thought ; then to attempt the deed —

Slave, thou art damned without redemption !

I '11 drive away this passion with a song —

A song ! Ha, ha ! a song ! as if, fond man,

Thy eyes could swim in laughter, when thy soul

Lies drenched and drownfed in red tears of blood !

I '11 pray, and see if God within my heart

Plant better thoughts. Why, prayers are meditations :

And when I meditate (O God, forgive me !)

It is on her divine perfections !

I will forget her : I will arm myself

Not to entertain a thought of love to her :

And when I come by chance into her presence,

I '11 hale these balls until my eye-strings crack

From being pulled and drawn to look that way !

In the seduction scene, after Mrs. Frankford has
enumerated all the reasons which make his suit pecu-
liarly odious, he answers :

O speak no more !
For more than this I know, and have recorded
Within the red -leaved table of my heart
Fair, and of all beloved, I was not fearful
Bluntly to give my life into your hand ;
And one hazard all my earthly means.
Go, tell your husband : he will turn me off.
And then I am undone. I care not, I ;
T was for your sake. Perchance in rage he '11 kill me :
I care not, 't was for you. Say I incur
The general name of villain through the world.
Of traitor to my friend — I care not, I.
Beggary, shame, death, scandal, and reproach.
For you I hazard all : why, what care I ?
For you I 'U love, and in your love 1 11 die.

470 SHAKSPKRE'S PREDECESSORS,

Then, playing the seducer s last card :

I will be secret, lady, close as night;
And not the light of one small glorious star
Shall shine here in my forehead, to bewray
That act of night

This brings her to his wishes. After she has fallen,
Hey wood makes her say that she yielded first * for
want of wit ; ' and we have to construct her charac-
ter upon this basis. WendoU, when the conflict with
his better impulse is once over, sinks into the mere
dead sea of adultery, and flies, a conscience-burdened
but not desperate man, to seek new fortunes in distant
lands. He disappears, in fact, from sight, as the
mischief-maker in such cases is wont to do.

Tastes may differ as to the moral wholesomeness
of the sentiment evolved in the last act. Some per-
haps will feel in it a touch too much of ' Frou Frou *
for their hearty liking. None, however, can deny its
dramatic beauty, or resist its artless claim upon our
sympathy. Mrs. Frankford is dying. Her brother
and his friends are round her. Her husband, yielding
to her death-bed prayer, has broken his resolve, and
enters her chamber with this salutation : ' How do
you, woman ? ' The reserve, indicated in these cold
words, has to be broken by her supplication :

Oh, good man,
And father to my children, pardon me !
Pardon, oh pardon me ! My fault so heinous is
That if you in this world forgive it not,
Heaven will not clear it in the world to come.
Faintness hath so usurped upon my knees.
That kneel I cannot, but on my heart's knees
My i)rostrate soul lies thrown down at your feet.
To beg your gracious pardon. Pardon, O pardon me !

' THE WITCH OF EDMONTON: 47 1

Then Frankford's heart melts :

As freely from the low depth of my soul

As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,

I pardon thee. I will shed tears for thee ;

Pray with thee ; and, in mere pity of thy weak estate,

I '11 wish to die with thee.

Even as I hope for pardon at that day,

When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits.

So be thou pardoned.

My wife, the mother to my pretty babes !

Both those lost names I do restore thee back,

And with this kiss I wed thee once again :

Though thou art wounded in thy honoured name.

And with that grief upon thy death-bed liest.

Honest in heart, upon my soul, thou diest.

It is difficult to say anything about such words as
these, except that they are true, true to good human
nature, true to the Christianity which all profess and
few exhibit. Hey wood's realistic method deserves to
be well studied by those who believe that realism is of
necessity hard, ugly, and vicious.

VII.

I have said that * The Witch of Edmonton ' breaks
up into two stories, united by a thread so slender as
to be hardly perceptible. With the tale of country
life which engages our interest in this intricate old
play, the witch, though she gives her name to the
whole work, has nothing to do. Sir Arthur Clarington
is a wealthy knight, living on his estate near Edmon-
ton. In his household are Winnifrede, a maid, and
Frank Thorney, the son of a poor gentleman. Before
the opening of the first act, Winnifrede has been

472 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

seduced by her master, and afterwards by her fellow-
servant She conceals from Frank her former con-
nection with Sir Arthur, and induces him to marry
her. Clarington. who sees his own advantage in this
match, promises to supply the young couple with
money. They are married ; and Winnifrede begins at
once to retrieve the errors of her past by honest con-
duct Her subsequent action engages the sympathy
which at the first we are unwilling to accord her.
Levity and deceit have placed her in a false position ;
but she gradually wins her way by simple faithfulness
and suffering into respect It is necessary that the
marriage should be concealed ; for old Thorney is of
gentle birth, and would ill brook his son's unthrifty act
of justice to a girl of doubtful character. Indeed, he
is already in treaty with a wealthy yeoman, Carter, for
the union of his son to the farmers well-dowered
daughter, Susan. Accordingly Frank places his wife
with her uncle, near Waltham Abbey, and returning to
his father's home, finds himself involved in a tangle of
falsehood and prevarication. He denies his marriage
with Winnifrede, of which a rumour has reached old
Thorney's ears, and produces a letter from his evil
genius Sir Arthur Clarington, attesting that he is still
a bachelor. Then the Squire unfolds his plan for
freeing the estate from debt by means of Susan's
dowry, and offers to resettle it upon his son. Frank
has not force of character to resist the pressure of cir-
cumstance. To give himself the lie and make a clean
breast to his father is now the only way of extricating
himself. But he chooses what seems, at the moment,
the easier course of drifting down the current :

FRANK THORNEY. 473

On ever)' side I am distracted ;
Am waded deeper into mischief
Than virtue can avoid ; but on I must :
Fate leads me ; I will follow.

Susan takes kindly to the young man as her lover ;
Carter presses on the match with rustic joviality ; the
dowry is paid down ; and Frank sees himself engaged
beyond recovery :

In vain he flees whom destiny pursues.

Ford, to whom we certainly owe the draught of
this character, has made young Thorney one of those
weak men who lay their crimes to the account of fate,
forgetting that * Man is his own star ; * nos te, 710s fact-
mus, Forhina, deam.

Married to Susan, who is a loving loyal wife, one
of the purest women in the long gallery of female
characters painted by our dramatists, Frank finds his
life intolerable. He really loves Winnifrede, whom he
knows to be waiting for him at her uncle's home. She
has to learn the truth of his disloyal conduct from his
lips ; a disclosure which she accepts with humility,
remembering her own fault. Frank's * second adul-
terous marriage ' is in truth only a little more criminal
in the sight of Heaven than that lie with which
Winnifrede first wedded him :

You had
The conquest f)f my maiden-love.

Only she is now reluctant to accept Frank's proposal
that they should escape together * with the dowry of his
sin,' and live their lives out in a foreign country.

Winnifrede assumes the habit of a page, in order

474 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

to attend her husband on a journey. Whither he is
bound, we are not told ; and, indeed, the whole of this
part of the drama is so ill-explained as to raise a sus-
picion whether two plays have not been curtailed and
fused into one piece. Susan walks with them, meaning
to bid Frank farewell a little further on his way ; and
now follows a very touching scene between the two
women, the real wife disguised in man's dress, and the
deceived Susan, who loves with all her heart and
strives to engage the interest of the supposed lad :

I know you were commended to my husband
By a noble knight.

This simple opening has such a painful irony, con-
sidering how Clarington had actually commended
Winnifrede to Frank, that it stings her like a snake's
fang :

Susan. How now ? What aiFst thou, lad ?

Win. Something hit mine eye (it makes it water still),
Even as you said * commended to my husband.'
Some dor I think it was. I was, forsooth,
Commended to him by Sir Arthur Clarington.

While they thus converse together, Susan in every
artless word revealing more and more of her sweet
woman's nature, Thorney joins them. The scene is
continued in a dialogue between him and Susan. She
is loth to part, and makes excuses always for following
a little further. He grows ever more and more im-
patient, feeling the situation intolerable. At last she
points to a certain clump of trees upon the hill's brow,
where she will say farewell :

That I may bring you through one pasture more
Up to yon knot of trees ; amongst whose shadows
I '11 vanish from you, they shall teach me how.

SUSAN AND IVINNIFREDE, 475

Winnifrede has passed ahead with the horses ; and
having reached that knot of trees, Frank's rising irri-
tation suddenly turns to a murderous impulse. He
will cut the bond which unites him to Susan ; she is
too clinging, too loving ; her kindness cloys and mad-
dens him. So he draws his knife ; but before he
plunges it into her breast, he tells her the whole story
of his former marriage, brutally. Then he stabs her
the first time. What follows is far from simple. I
will transcribe the dialogue, since it raises the question
so often forced upon us by the later work of the
dramatists, whether such rhetorical embroidery of a
poignant situation is pathetic or involves a bathos :

Frank, I was before wedded to another ; have her stilL
I do not lay the sin unto your charge ;
*T is all my own : your marriage was my theft ;
For I espoused your dowry, and I have it :
I did not purpose to have added murder.
The devil did not prompt me — till this minute * —
You might have safe returned ; now you cannot.
You have dogged your own death. \Stabs her,

Sus, And I deserve it ;
I am glad my fate was so intelligent :
T was some good spirit's motion. Die ? Oh, 't was time !
How many years might I have slept in sin,
The sin of my most hatred, too, adultery !

Fr. Nay, sure *t was likely that the most was past \
For I meant never to return to you
After this parting.

' The old copy, says Gifford, punctuates this line thus :

The devil did not prompt me : till this minute
You might have safe returned.

In fact, the devil, in the shape of Mother Sawyer's black dog, had just
rubbed up against him, enticing him by contagion to the crime. I see
here a point of doubt in the construction of the drama, which confirms
the view I have already expressed that The Wiich of Edmofiion is really
two separate plays, pieced together by an afterthought

476 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Sus, AMiy, then I thank you more :
You have done lovingly, lea\nng yourself.
That you would thus bestow me on another.
Thou art my husband, Death, and I embrace thee
With all the love I have. Forget the stain
Of my unwitting sin ; and then I come
A crystal virgin to thee : my soul's purity
Shall, with bold wings, ascend the doors of Mercy ;
For innocence is ever her comjxinion.

Fr, Not yet mortal ? I would not linger you,
Or leave you a tongue to blab. \^Stabs her again,

Sus, Now, Heaven reward you ne'er the worse for me !
I did not think that Death had been so sweet,
Nor I so apt to love him. I could ne'er die better,
Had I stayed forty years for preparation ;
For I 'm in charity with all the world.
Let me for once be thine example. Heaven ;
Do to this man, as I him free forgive ;
And may he better die, and better live 1 [Dies,

Having completed this dastardly murder, Frank
wounds his own body and contrives to tie himself to
a tree, where he calls aloud for help. His father and
old Carter enter to his crj' ; he charges the crime on
two former suitors of Carters daughter, Somerton
and Warbeck, and is taken back to Carter's house to
have his wounds cured. Winnifrede, who knows
nothing of his guilt in this last fact, follows him still
dressed like a page, and in his sick-bed he is waited
on by her and Susan's sister, Katharine, another fair
type of womanhood. The prolonged dialogue, which
constitutes the beauty of this play, rises nowhere to a
higher point of Euripidean realism than in a scene
where Frank is discovered conscience-smitten, feverish,
and haunted by delirious fancies, between Katharine
and Winnifrede. The ghost of Susan stands at his
bedside. He cannot distinguish phantoms from reali-

THE END OF FRANK, 477

ties. For a while he strives to maintain the fiction of
Susan s murder by Somerton and Warbeck. At the
last he breaks down, and reveals the truth to Winni-
frede. Meantime, the two women surround him with
gentle ministrations and consolatory words, going
about their work with heavy hearts indeed, but bent
on helpful service, until the point when Katharine
discovers a bloody knife in Frank s coat pocket, jumps
at once to the conclusion of his guilt, and hurries out
to warn her father. The play runs fast to its con-
clusion now. Frank is, of course, executed, and, of
course, goes manfully, repentant, to his death. Very
touching scenes are written in this part for old Thorney
and for Winnifrede, who grows continually upon our
sympathy :

Thor, Daughter, be comforted.

Win. Comfort and I
Are too far separated to be joined
But in eternity ; I share too much
Of him that *s going thither.

War, Poor woman, *t was not thy fault.

Win, My fault was lust, my punishment was shame.

Frank is led by :

Thou much-w^ronged woman, I must sigh for thee,
As he that 's only loath to leave the world
For that he leaves thee in it unprovided.
Unfriended.

Winnifrede responds :

Might our souls together
Climb to the height of their eternity,
And there enjoy what earth denied us, happiness !

Students of the text will judge how far such pas-

478 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

sages as these are marred by elaborate expansion in
Ford s frigidly rhetorical manner. For my own part,
I can bear the exhibition of the playwright's conscious
art, because I recognise its dramatic effectiveness.

I said that F*rank Thorney s romance is joined to
the second story of this drama by a slender thread.
That thread I have omitted in my exposition. His
sudden impulse to murder Susan is supposed to pro-
ceed from a spell cast on him by Mother Sawyer, the
Witch of Edmonton, whose familiar spirit, in the shape
of a black dog, appears upon the stage at the moment
of his crime, and again reappears before the discovery
of the bloody knife. But the playwrights bungled
their work sadly in the opening of the third act, where
the witch's malice might have been motived and
brought into play. They took no pains to connect
her with Frank Thorney, and suffered her to wreak
her spite upon a crowd of minor personages. I cannot,
indeed, avoid the suspicion that we either possess * The
Witch of Edmonton ' in a mutilated form, or that its
authors hastily patched two separate compositions
together with slight attention to unity.

This want of cohesion is no drawback to the force
and pathos of Mother Sawyer's portrait ; perhaps the
best picture of a witch transmitted to us from an age
which believed firmly in witchcraft, but drawn by men
whose humanity was livelier than their superstition.
From the works of our Elizabethan Dramatists we
might select studies of witch life more imaginative,
more ghastly, more grotesque : Middleton's Hecate
and Stadlin, Marston's Erichtho, Jonson's Maudlin,
Shakspere's weird sisters and Sycorax. None of

MOTHER SAWYER, 479

these, however, are so true to common life ; touched
with so fine a sense of natural justice. The outcast
wretchedness which drove old crones to be what their
cursed neighbours fancied them, is painted here with
truly dreadful realism. We see the witch in making,
watch the persecutions which convert her from a village
pariah to a potent servant of the devil, peruse her
arguments in self-defence, and follow her amid the
jeers and hootings of the rabble to her faggot-grave.
Mother Sawyer first appears upon the stage gathering
sticks :

And why on me ? Why should the envious world

I'hrow all their scandalous malice upon me ?

Cause I am j)oor, deformed, and ignorant,

And like a bow buckled and bent together

Hy some more strong in mischief than myself,

Must I for that be made a common sink

For all the filth and rubbish of men's tongues

To fall and run into ? Some call me witch ;

And being ignorant of myself, they go

About to teach me how to be one ; urging

That my bad tongue, by their bad usage made so,

Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn,

Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.

This they enforce upon me ; and in part

Make me to credit it.

Beaten before our eyes by a brutal peasant, she falls
to cursing, and stretches out her heart's desire toward
the unknown power * more strong in mischiefs than
herself : '

What is the name ? Where, and by what art learned,
What spells, what charms or invocations.
May the thing called Familiar be purchased ?

The village rabble fall upon her, lash her with their

48o SHAKSPERK'S PREDECESSORS.

leathern belts, and din the name of witch into her
ears, until the name becomes a part of her :

I have heard old beldams
Talk of familiars in the shai)e of mice,
Rats, ferrets, weasels, and I wot not what,
That have appeared, and sucked, some say, their blood ;
But by what means they came acquainted with them,
I now am ignorant. Would some power, good or bad,
Instruct me which way I might be revenged
Upon this churl, I 'd go out of myself.
And give this fury leave to dwell within
This ruined cottage, ready to fall with age I
Abjure all goodness, be at hate with prayer,
And study curses, imprecations.
Blasphemous speeches, oaths, detested oaths,
Or anything that 's ill : so I might work
Revenge upon this miser, this black cur.
That barks and bites, and sucks the verv blood
Of me, and of my credit. 'T is all one
To be a witch, as to be counted one.
Vengeance, shame, ruin light upon that canker !

As the devil himself, later on in the play, observes:

Thou never art so distant
From an evil spirit, but that thy oaths.
Curses and blasphemies pull him to thine elbow.

This Mother Sawyer now experiences ; for the familiar
she has been invoking, starts up beside her in the form
of a black dog :

Ho I have I found thee cursing ? Now thou art
Mine own.

From him she learns the formula by which he may
be summoned, seals their compact by letting him suck
blood from her veins, and proceeds to use him against
her enemies.

THE WITCH. 481

Whoever wrote the part of Mother Sawyer — Dek-
ker or Rowley ; for we cannot attribute it to Ford —
took care to exhibit her from several points of view.
Interrogated by two magistrates, she stands for her
defence upon the blunt democracy of evil :

I am none — no witch.
None but base curs so bark at me ; I am none.
Or would I were ! if every poor woman
Be trod on thus by slaves, reviled, kicked, beaten,
As I am daily, she to be revenged
Had need turn witch.

Men in gay clothes,
Whose backs are laden with titles and honours.
Are within far more crooked than I am.
And if I be a witch, more witch-like.
A witch ! who is not ?

What are your painted things in princes' courts.
Upon whose eyelids lust sits, blowing fires
To burn men's souls in sensual hot desires ?
Have you not city-witches, who can turn
Their husbands' wares, whole standing shops of wares.
To sumptuous tables, gardens of stolen sin ?
Reverence once

Had wont to wait on age ; now an old woman.
Ill-favoured grown with years, if she be poor.
Must be called bawd or witch. Such, so abused.
Are the coarse witches ; t' other are the fine.
Spun for the devil's own wearing.

So she rages on. Termagant wives, covetous attorneys,
usurers, seducers, these are the true witches ; not hate-
hardened, miserable beldams.^ Folengo and Michelet
have not laid bare with satire or philosophy more

* This fierce apology of Mother Sawyer might be paralleled from that
grim satire with which Folengo in his Maccaronic epic of Baldus
draws the Court of the Sorceress Smima Gulfora from all classes of
society. See Renaissance in Italy ^ vol. v. pp. 348-3 «;o.

I I

482 ShAKSPEKE'S PREDECESSORS,

searching the common elements of human evil, out of
which witchcraft sprang like a venomous and obscene
toadstool.

After this outburst against the hypocrisies of a
society with which she is at open war, the wretched
creature takes solace with her familiar in a scene
grotesquely ghastly :

I am dried up

With cursing and with madness ; and have yet

No blood to moisten these sweet lips of thine.

Stand on thy hind legs up — kiss me, my Tommy,

And rub away some wrinkles on my brow,

By making my old ribs to shrug for joy

Of thy fine tricks.

The effects of her damned traffic with the fiend are
obvious in murder, suicide, domestic ruin. But as time
goes on, her power wanes, and the familiar deserts her.
She calls upon him, famished, in her isolation :

Still wronged by every slave ? and not a dog

Barks in his dame's defence ? I am called witch.

Yet am myself bewitched from doing harm.

Have I given up myself to thy black lust

Thus to be scorned ? Not see me in three days I

I 'm lost without my Tomalin ; prithee come ;

Revenge to me is sweeter far than life :

Thou art my raven, on whose coal-black wings

Revenge comes flying to me. O my best love !

I am on fire, even in the midst of ice.

Raking my blood up, till my shrunk knees feel

Thy curled head leaning on them ! Come, then, my darling ;

If in the air thou hoverest, fall upon me

In some dark cloud ; and as I oft have seen

Dragons and serpents in the elements,

Appear thou now so to me. Art thou i' the sea ?

Muster up all the monsters from the deep,

And be the ugliest of them; so that my bulch

ROWLEY'S CONCEPTION OF WITCHCRAFT, 483

Show but his swarth cheek to me, let earth cleave,
And break from hell, I care not ! could I run
Like a swift powder-mine beneath the world,
Up would I blow it all, to find thee out.
Though I lay ruined in it Not yet come!
I must then fall to my old prayer.

The dog appears at last, but changed in hue from black
to white — the sign, he mockingly assures her, of her
coming trial and death. We do not see her again till
she is brought out for execution, with the rabble raging
round her :

Cannot a poor old woman have your leave
To die without vexation ?

Is every devil mine ?
Would I had one now whom I might command
To tear you all to pieces !
Have I scarce breath enough to say my prayers,
And would you force me to spend that in bawling ?

The part, from beginning to ending, is terribly sus-
tained. Not one single ray of human sympathy or kind-
ness falls upon the abject creature. She is alone in her
misery and sin, abandoned to the black delirium of God-
forsaken anguish. To paint a witch as she is here
painted — midway between an oppressed old woman
and a redoubtable agent of hell — and to incorporate
this double personality in the character of a common
village harridan, required firm belief in sorcery, that
curse-begotten curse of social life, which flung back on
human nature its own malice in the form of diabolical
malignity.

The attention I have paid to these five domestic

tragedies may seem to be out of due proportion to the

1 1 2

484 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

scheme of my work. I think, however, that I am
justified by their exceptional importance. Works of
finer fibre and more imaginative quality illustrate in a
less striking degree the command of dramatic effect
which marked our theatre in its earliest as in its latest
development

485

CHAPTER XII.

TRAGEDY OF BLOOD.

I. The Tough Fibres of a London Audience — Craving for Strong Sensa-
tion— Specific Note of English Melodrama — Its Lyrical and Pathetic
Relief. — IL Thomas Kyd — * Hieronymo * and * The Spanish Tragedy * —
Analysis of the Story — Stock-Ingredients of a Tragedy of Blood —
The Ghost — The Villain — The Romantic Lovers — Suicide, Murder,
Insanity. — III. *Soliman and Perseda* — The Induction to this Play —
* The Tragedy of Hoffmann.* — IV. Marlowe's use of this Form — * The
Jew of Malta' — * Titus Andronicus' — * Lust's Dominion' — Points oi
Resemblance between * Hamlet ' and * The Spanish Tragedy ' — Use
made by Marston, Webster, and Toumeur of the Species. — V. The
Additions to *The Spanish Tragedy* — Did Jonson make them? —
Quotation from the Scene of Hieronymo in the Garden.

N.B. Ail the Tragedies discussed in this chapter will be found in
Hazlitt's Dodsley,

The sympathies of the London audience on which our
playwrights worked might be compared to the chords
of a warrior's harp, strung with twisted iron and bulls'
sinews, vibrating mightily, but needing a stout stroke
to make them thrill. This serves to explain that con-
ception of Tragedy which no poet of the epoch
expressed more passionately than Marston in his pro-
logue to ' Antonio's Revenge,' and which early took
possession of the stage. The reserve of the Greek
Drama, the postponement of physical to spiritual
anguish, the tuning of morstl discord to dignified

486 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and solemn moods of sustained suffering, was un-
known in England. Playwrights used every con-
ceivable means to stir the passion and excite the
feeling of their audience. They glutted them with
horrors ; cudgelled their horny fibres into sensitiveness.
Hence arose a special kind of play, which may be
styled the Tragedy of Blood, existing, as it seems to
do, solely in and for bloodshed. The action of these
tragedies was a prolonged tempest. Blows fell like hail-
stones ; swords flashed like lightning ; threats roared
like thunder ; poison was poured out like rain. As a re-
lief to such crude elements of terror, the poet strove to
play on finer sympathies by means of pathetic interludes
and ' lyrical interbreathings ' — by the exhibition of a
mother s agony or a child's trust in his murderer, by
dialogues in which friend pleads with friend for priority
in death or danger, by images leading the mind away
from actual horrors to ideal sources of despair, by the
soliloquies of a crazed spirit, by dirges and songs of
* old, unhappy, far-off things,' by crescendos of accu-
mulated passion, by the solemn beauty of religious
resignation. This variety of effect characterises the
Tragedies of Blood. These lyrical and imaginative
elements idealise their sanguinary melodrama.

II.

Thomas Kyd — if * Hieronymo ' and * The Spanish
Tragedy ' are correctly ascribed to him — may be called
the founder of this species.^ About his life we know
absolutely nothing, although it may be plausibly con-

• I have adhered throughout to the spelling Hieronymo^ though the
first part of the play in the 4to of 1605 is called leronimo.

'THE SPANISH TRACED Y^ 487

jectured that he received a fair academical education.
He makes free use of classical mythology in the style
of Greene, and interrupts his English declamation with
Latin verses. For many years Kyd occupied a pro-
minent place among the London dramatists. His two
epoch-making plays were ridiculed by Shakspere and
Jonson, proving their popularity with the common
folk long after the date (earlier than 1588) of their
original production. Jonson in his lines on Shakspere
gave to Kyd the epithet of * sporting/ apparently with
the view of scoring a bad pun, rather than with any
reference to the playwright's specific style.

'Hieronymo' and *The Spanish Tragedy' are
practically speaking one play irr two parts. . Andrea, a
nobleman of Spain, is sent to claim tribute from the
King of Portugal. During this embassy a Portuguese,
Balthazar, defies him to single combat. When the
duel takes place, Andrea falls ; but he is avenged by
his friend Horatio, son of Jeronymo, Marshal of Spain.
During life Andrea had enjoyed the love of a lady,
Bellimperia, whose brother, Lorenzo, is a Court villain
of the darkest dye. After Andrea's death, Horatio
makes Balthazar his captive, and brings him back to
Spain, where he, Horatio, pledges his troth to Bellim-
peria, and is beloved by her instead of the slain Andrea.
Lorenzo, however, chooses that she shall be married to
Balthazar. He therefore murders Horatio, and hangs
him to a tree in his father's garden. Old Hieronymo
discovers the corpse, is half crazed by grief, and de-
votes the rest of his life to vengeance on the assassins.
With this object in view, he presents a play at Court,
in which he and Bellimperia, Lorenzo and Balthazar,
act several parts. The kings of Spain and Portugal

488 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

assist at the performance. At the close of the tragic
piece, Hieronymo and Bellimperia stab the two traitors
in good earnest, and afterwards put an end to their
own lives upon the stage.

This oudine of * The Spanish Tragedy * will give a
fair notion of the stock ingredients of a Tragedy of
Blood. There is a ghost in it — the ghost of Andrea —
crying out, 'Revenge! Vindicta!* as it stalks about
the stage. There is a noble and courageous lover,
young Horatio, traitorously murdered. There is a
generous open-hearted gentleman, old Hieronymo,
forced to work out his plot of vengeance by craft, and
crazy with intolerable wrongs. There is a consum-
mate vdlain, Lorenzo, who uses paid assassins, broken
courtiers, needy men-at-arms, as instruments in schemes
of secret malice. There is a beautiful and injured
lady, Bellimperia, whose part is one romantic tissue of
love, passion, pathos, and unmerited suffering. There
is a play within the play, used to facilitate the bloody
climax. There are scenes of extravagant insanity,
relieved by scenes of euphuistic love-making in
sequestered gardens; scenes of martial conflict, fol-
lowed by pompous shows at Court ; kings, generals,
clowns, cutthroats, chamberlains, jostling together in a
masquerade medley, a carnival of swiftly moving
puppets. There are, at least, five murders, two
suicides, two judicial executions, and one death in
duel. The principal personage, Hieronymo, bites out
his tongue and flings it on the stage ; stabs his enemy
with a stiletto, and pierces his own heart. Few of the
characters survive to bury the dead, and these few are
of secondary importance in the action.

'TRAGEDY OF HOFFMANN: 489

III.

A contemporary and anonymous tragedy, * SoHman
and Perseda/ illustrates the same melodramatic quali-
ties of unfortunate love and wholesale bloodshed. It
hardly deserves notice, except as showing how the
Tragedy of Blood took form. I may also mention
that it was selected by Kyd for the play within the
play presented by his hero Hieronymo. The Induc-
tion to this piece is curious. Love, Death, and For-
tune dispute among themselves which takes the leading
part in tragedies of human life. They agree to watch
the action of the drama ; and at the end. Death sums his
triumphs up, proving himself indisputably victor :

Alack ! Love and Fortune play In Comedies !
For powerful Death best fitteth Tragedies.

Love retires, beaten, but unsubdued :

I go, yet Love shall never yield to Death !

One more of the earlier melodramas, written to
glut the audience with bloodshed, deserves mention.
This was the work of Henry Chettle, produced before
the year 1598, and styled * The Tragedy of Hoffmann ;
or, a Revenge for a Father.' The scene is laid on the
shores of the Baltic The hero is son to Admiral
Hoffmann, who had been executed unjustly for piracy,
by having a crown of red-hot iron forced upon his
head. The son hangs up his fathers corpse as a
memento of revenge, and by various devices murders

490 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

in succession six or seven of the enemies who were
instrumental in his death. At the end he, too, dies
by imposition of the fiery crown. This grisly drama
of retributive cruelty, enacted in a remote region of
the Northern seas, combining the most violent in-
cidents of torture and assassination, has no beauty of
language, no force of character, no ingenuity of plot,
to excuse its violation of artistic decencies. It relies
upon fantastic horror for effect.

IV.

Enough has been said to indicate a species which
took firm possession of the stage. Marlowe, finding
it already popular, raised it to higher rank by the
transfiguring magic of his genius. * The Jew of Malta '
marks a decided step in advance upon the plays which
I have noticed. Two dramas of superior merit, clearly
emanating from the school of Marlowe, may also
be reckoned among the Tragedies of Blood in this
second period of elaboration. These are ' Titus An-
dronicus,* which, on the faith of an old anecdote, we
may perhaps infer to have been the work of an amateur,
dressed for the theatre by Shakspere ; and ' Lust's
Dominion ; or, The Lascivious Queen,' a play ascribed
to Marlowe, but now believed to have been written by
Dekker, Haughton, and Day. Both in ' Titus An-
dronicus ' and in ' Lust s Dominion,' Marlowe's san-
guinary Jew is imitated. Barabas, Aaron, and Eleazar
are of the same kindred. I shall have occasion to
study Barabas closely in another chapter of this book.
Aaron/ since he rests beneath the aegis of Shakspere s

'LUST'S dominion: 491

name, may here be left untouched.^ But Eleazar,
and the play of * Lust's Dominion/ in which he takes
the leading part, demand some words of passing
comment. This is strictly a Tragedy of Blood ; yet
the motive, as its title implies, is lawless appe-
tite leading to death in various forms. The Queen
Mother of Spain loves Eleazar, the Moor, with
savage passion. King Fernando loves Maria, the
Moor's wife. Cardinal Mendoza loves the Queen.
Each of these personages sacrifices duty, natural affec-
tion, humanity itself, to ungovernable desire. Eleazar
alone remains cold and calculating, using their weak-
ness to attain his own ambitious ends. Pretending
love to the Queen, he forces her to kill her son Philip,
and then schemes her murder. In order to check-
mate the Cardinal, he betrays his young wife to Fer-
nando, albeit she is 'chaste as the white moon.' His
designs, at the last, prove unavailing, and he dies in
stubborn contumacy. Ambition was his devil ; the
strength of intellect, the physical courage, possessed by
him in no common measure, he concentrated on the
end of climbing to a throne through blood The

' Aaron seems to me as inferior to Barabas in poetic and dramatic
pith, as he exceeds him in brutality. But the play of Titus Andronicus
is interesting, independently of this villain's character, for its systematic
blending, and in some sense heightening, of all the elements which
constitute a Tragedy of Blood. We have a human sacrifice and the
murder of a son by his father in the first act ; in the second, a murder
and the rape and mutilation of a woman ; in the third, two executions
and the mutilation of the hero ; in the fourth, a murder ; in the fifth, six
murders, a judicial death by torture, and a banquet set before a queen of
her two dead sons' flesh. The hyperbolical pathos of Lavinia's part, the
magnificent lunacy of Titus (so like to that of Hieronymo in quality), and
the romantic lyrism which relieves and stimulates imagination, belong to
the very essence of the species. So also does the lust of Tamora and the
frantic dcvilishnessof her paramour.

492 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

direct imitation of Marlowe is obvious in the large
conception, broad handling, and exaggerated execution
of this character, no less than in the florid imagery and
sounding versification which distinguish the style
adopted by the authors of the play. It is, in fact, a
creditable, though extremely disagreeable, piece of
imitative craftsmanship.

The Tragedy of Blood, passing successively
through the stages marked by Kyd and Marlowe, be-
came a stock species. It would not be correct to
assign any of Shakspere s undoubted dramas to this
class. Yet Shakspere did not disdain to spiritualise
what his predecessors had so grossly and materialisti-
cally rough-hewn. ' Hamlet,' as it has been often pointed
out, is built upon the lines suggested by * The Spanish
Tragedy,' and uses for its poetry, philosophy, and
passion, motives pre-existing in the English melo-
drama.

Three considerable playwrights of the later age
devoted their talents to the Tragedy of Blood.
These were Marston, Webster, and Toumeur. Ghosts,
Court villains, paid assassins, lustful princes, romantic
lovers, injured and revengeful victims, make up the
personages of their drama ; and the stage is drenched
with blood. There is one standing personage in these
later melodramas, which had from the earliest been
sketched firmly enough by Kyd in ' Hieronymo.*
That is the desperate instrument of perfidy and mur-
der. When Lorenzo, the arch-villain of * The Spanish
Tragedy,' needs an agent, he bethinks him of a certain
Lazarotto :

I have a lad in pickle of this stamp,
A melancholy discontented courtier,

COURT VILLAINS, 493

Whose famished jaws look like the chap of death ;

Upon whose eyebrow hangs damnation ;

Whose hands are washed in rape and murders bold ;

Him with a golden bait w^ill I allure,

For courtiers will do anything for gold.

In the hands of Webster the rough sketch of Lazarotto
became the finished pictures of Flamineo and Bosola.
Tourneur transformed the ' melancholy discontented
courtier ' into Vendice. Marston played various tunes
on the same jangled lute. All three of them had
recourse to Kyds fantastic incident of Masques, dis-
guising murder. But it was reserved alone for Webster
to stamp the Tragedy of Blood with a high spiritual
and artistic genius. The thing, when he touched it,
unlocked springs of sombre dramatic terror and way-
ward picturesque effect beyond the reach of vulgar
workmen.

I shall close this brief study with a return to

* The Spanish Tragedy.' From Henslowe's Diary we
learn that Ben Jonson received divers sums in 1601
and 1602 for additions to this play. These additions,

* the very salt of the old play,' in Lamb's often quoted
words, are so unlike Jonson's style that few students
of our Drama would disagree with Lamb in wishing he
could ascribe them to ' some more potent spirit,' per-
haps to Webster. Still there is no external reason for
assigning them to any known writer of the time, or for
rejecting the plain evidence of Henslowe's Diary.^

* Henslowe, under the dates Sept. 25, 1601, and June 24, 1602, lent
Jonson sums of money for additions and new additions to Hieronymo,

494 s;hakspere's predecessors.

Jonson certainly produced nothing so poignant and
far-searching in his acknowledged tragedies. Yet we
may perhaps refer this circumstance to self-restraint
and resolute adherence to dramatic theory. Jonson was
a doctrinaire, we know, and his mature canons of art
were opposed to the Romantic method. But we need
not, therefore, determine that so powerful a writer could
not have worked upon occasion in a style which he
deliberately afterwards rejected in obedience to formed
opinions.

One dialogue between Hieronymo, crazed by find-
ing the dead body of his son suspended to the tree in
his own garden, and a painter introduced for the sole
purpose of discoursing with him, might be selected
to illustrate the mingled extravagance and truth to
nature which is characteristic of English melodrama.
There is here a leonine hunger, blent with pathetic
tenderheartedness, a brooding upon * things done long
ago and ill done,' an alternation between lunacy and the
dull moodiness of reasonable woe, which brings the
maddened old man vividly before us. The picture is
only less terrible than that of Lear — less terrible be-
cause more artificially fantastic. The doubt regarding
its composition renders it furthermore so curious that
I do not hesitate to quote the passage at full length.

Hieronymo is discm^ered in his garden. First enters to him his wife
Isabella. TJun a servant^ Pedro, ivho introduces the Painter.

Isa. Dear Hieronymo, come in a doors,
O seek not means so to increase thy sorrow.

In the year 1602 the play was printed in 4to as being * enlarged with new
additions of the Painter's part and others.' The agreement of dates
between Henslowe's memoranda and the publication of the enlarged
play is too important to escape notice.

ADDITIONS TO HIERONYMO. 495

Hier, Indeed, Isabella, we do nothing here ;
I do not cry, ask Pedro and Jaques :
Not I, indeed ; we are very merry, very merry.

Isa, How ? Be merry here, be merry here ?
Is not this the place, and this the very tree,
Where my Horatio died, where he was murdered ?

Hier, Was — do not say what : let her weep it out.
This was the tree, I set it of a kernel ;
And when our hot Spain could not let it grow.
But that the infant and the human sap
Began to wither, duly twice a morning
Would I be sprinkling it with fountain water :
At last it grew and grew, and bore and bore :
Till at length it grew a gallows, and did bear our son.
It bore thy fruit and mine. O wicked, wicked plant.
See who knocks there. [One knocks within at the door.

Fed. It is a painter, sir.

Hier, Bid him come in, and paint some comfort,
For surely there 's none lives but painted comfort
Let him come in, one knows not what may chance.
God's will [it was] that I should set this tree I but even so
Masters ungrateful servants rear from nought,
And then they hate them that did bring them up.

77u Painter enters.

Pain, God bless you, sir.

Hier, Wherefore, why, thou scornful villain ?
How, where, or by what means should I be blessed ?

Isa, What wouldst thou have, good fellow ?

Pain, Justice, madam.

liter. O ambitious beggar, wouldst thou have that
That lives not in the world?
Why, all the undelved mines cannot buy
An ounce of justice, 't is a jewel so inestimable.
I tell thee, God hath engrossed all justice in His hands,
And there is none but what comes from Him.

Pain, O, then I see that God must right me for my murdered son !

Hier, How ? Was thy son murdered ?

Pain, Ay, sir, no man did hold a son so dear.

Hier, What ! not as thine ? That 's a lie
As massy as the earth : I had a son,
Whose least unvalued hair did weigh
A thousand of thy sons; and he was murdered

496 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Pain, Alas ! sir, I had no more but he.

Hier. Nor I, nor I ; but this same one of mine
Was worth a legion. But all is one.
Pedro, Jaques, go in a doors. Isabella, go ;
And this good fellow here and I
Will range this hideous orchard up and down,
Like two she lions, Veaved of their young.

Go in a doors, I say. [Exeunt TheYki^TESLand hesit doivn.

Come, let 's talk wisely now.
Was thy son murdered ?

Pain, Ay, sir.

Hier, So was mine.
How dost thou take it ? Art thou not sometime mad ?
Is there no tricks that come before thine eyes ?

Pain, O Lord ! yes, sir.

Hier. Art a painter? Canst paint me a tear, a wound ?
A groan or a sigh ? Canst paint me such a tree as this ?

Pain, Sir, I am sure you have heard of my painting ;
My name 's Bazardo.

Hier, Bazardo ! 'fore God, an excellent fellow ! Look you, sir.
Do you see ? I 'd have you paint me in my gallery, in your oil-
colours matted, and draw me five years younger than I am : do
you see, sir? Let five years go, let them go — my wife Isabella
standing by me, with a speaking look to my son Horatio, which
should intend to this, or some such like purpose : * God bless thee !
my sweet son ; ' and my hand leaning upon his head thus, sir ; do
you see ? May it be done ?

Pain, Very well, sir.

Hier, Nay, I pray, mark me, sir.
Then, sir, would I have you paint me this tree, this very tree :
Canst paint a doleful cry ?

Pain, Seemingly, sir.

Hier, Nay, it should cry ; but all is one.
Well, sir, paint me a youth run through and through ;
With villains* swords hanging upon this tree.
Canst thou draw a murderer ?

Pain, 111 warrant you, sir; I have the pattern of the most
notorious villains that ever lived in all Spain.

Hier, O let them be worse, worse ; stretch thine art,
And let their beards be of Judas's own colour.
And let their eyebrows jut over : in any case observe that

Then, sir, after some violent noise, bring me forth in my shirt,
and my gown under my arm, with my torch in my hand, and my

MYSTERY OF AUTHORSHIP. 497

sword reared up thus, and with these words, * What noise is this ?
Who calls Hieronymo ? * May it be done ?

Pain, Yea, sir.

Hier, Well, sir, then bring me forth — bring me through alley
and alley, still with a distracted countenance going along, and let my
hair heave up my night cap. Let the clouds scowl ; make the
moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds blowing, the bells tolling,
the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the
clock striking twelve. And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man
hanging, and tottering, and tottering, as you know the wind will
wave a man, and with a trice to cut him down. And looking upon
him by advantage of my torch, find it to be my son Horatio. There
you may show a passion ; there you may show a passion. Draw
me like old Priam of Troy, cr}'ing, * The house is a-fire, the house
is a-fire,' and the torch over my head ; make me curse, make me
rave, make me cr)-, make me mad, make me well again ; make me
curse hell, invocate, and in the end leave me in a trance, and so
forth.

Pain, And is this the end ?

Hier, O no, there is no end ; the end is death and madness.
And I am never better than when I am mad.
Then methinks, I am a brave fellow ;
Then I do wonders ; but reason abuseth me ;
And there 's the torment, there 's the hell.
Al last, sir, bring to me one of the murderers ;
Were he as strong as Hector,
Thus would I tear and drag him uj) and down.

\^He beats the Painter in,

After all has been said and suggested, impenetrable
mystery hangs over the authorship of this scene.
Henslowes Diary and certain allusions to * The
Spanish Tragedy ' in Jonson's comedies, point to Ben
Jonson as the writer. But it is almost impossible to
conceive that Ben Jonson, if he had composed this
scene to order while yet a prentice in the playwright's
craft, should have afterwards abandoned a style which
he commanded with such gust and passion. How
came he to exchange it for that scholastic mannerism

K K

498 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

which, except for the romantic passages of * The Case
is Altered,' we discern as second nature in his genius ?
Had Shakspere a hand in these additions ? Or was he,
perhaps, thinking of Hieronymo's hyperbolical retort
upon the Painter, when he penned for * Hamlet ' :

I loved Ophelia ; forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum ?

Had the author of ' Titus Andronicus* anything to do
with them ? Or, in the lunacies of Titus, did he
simply imitate and dilute the concentrated frenzy of
Hieronymo? Such queries and surmises are idle.
But they have at least the effect of keeping vividly
before our minds the extraordinary potency of scenes
which tempt us to ever new unprofitable guess-work.

499

CHAPTER XIII.

JOHN LYLY.

I. The Publication of* Euphues'— Its Two Parts— Outline of the Story.—
II. It forms a Series of Short Treatises— Love — Conduct — Education
— A Book for Women. III. Its Popularity — The Spread of Euphu-
ism— What we Mean by that Word. — IV. Qualities of Medieval
Taste— Allegory — Symbolism — The Bestiaries — Qualities of Early
Humanism— Scholastic Subtleties — Petrarchistic Diction — Bad Taste
in Italy — Influence of Italian Literature — The Affectation of the
Sixteenth Century- Definition of Euphuism — Illustrations. — V. Lyly
becomes a Courtier— His Want of Success — The Simplicity of his
Dramatic Prose — The Beauty of the Lyrics — The Novelty of his
Court-Comedies. — VI. Eight Pieces ascribed to Lyly — Six Played
before Elizabeth — The Allegories of their Classic Fables — * Endimion '
— Its Critique. — VII. * Midas' — Political Allusions — * Sapho and
Phao' — * Elizabeth and Leicester* — Details of this Comedy.— VIII.
' Alexander and Campaspe ' — Touch upon Greek Story — Diogenes —
A Dialogue on Love — The Lyrics. — IX. *Gallathea' — Its Relation to
* As You Like It ' — * Love's Metamorphosis' — Its Relation to Jonson
— * Mother Bombie' — *The Woman in the Moon.' — X. Lyly as a
Master of his Age — Influence on Shakspere — His Inventions.

In the year 1579 a book appeared in London which
was destined to make an epoch in English literary
history, and to win for its author fame and fashion
almost unparalleled among his contemporaries. This
book bore the title of * Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit/
It was written by John Lyly, a member of Magdalen
College, Oxford, Master of Arts, then in his twenty-
seventh year. In the spring following, a sequel, called
* Euphues, his England,' issued from the press. The

K K 3

500 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

two parts formed one work, conceived and executed
after the Italian style of moral dissertation and romantic
story. * Euphues ' is, in fact, a collection of essays, tales,
letters, and meditative disquisitions, * sowed,' to use the
author s own words, * here and there like strawberries,
not in heaps like hops/ In planning this book Lyly
had a clearly didactic intention. It was his purpose to
set forth opinions regarding the formation of character
by training and experience ; to criticise social conduct ;
to express his views upon love and friendship, religion
and philosophy ; to discuss the then so favourite topic
of foreign travel ; and to convey this miscellaneous
instruction in a form agreeable to his readers.

The story, with which Lyly interwove his weightier
discourses, may be briefly told. The book opens with
a minute description of the hero's character and person.
Euphues, who is meant to embody the qualities denoted
by his Greek name, is an Athenian youth of good
fortune, comely presence, and quick parts, somewhat
too much g^ven to pleasure. He comes to Naples,
where he makes acquaintance with an old man named
Eubulus, and a young man called Philautus. Eubulus
gives him abundance of good counsel, both as regards
the conduct of his life in general and the special dangers
he will have to meet in Naples. Euphues receives it
kindly, but prefers to buy wisdom by experience,
arguing that it ill beseems a young man to rule himself
by the precepts of the aged, before he has tasted of life
for himself. With Philautus he strikes up a romantic
friendship. This new comrade brings him into the
society of Lucilla, a Neapolitan lady, to whom Philautus
is already paying his addresses with her father's sane-

STORY OF 'EUPHUES: 501

tion. In their first interview, Lucillaand Euphues fall
in love, each with the other. Euphues tries to conceal
his passion from his friend by pretending to admire
another woman, Livia ; but, in the absence of Philau-
tus, he declares his love to Lucilla, and receives the con-
fession of hers in return. Lucilla, when urged by her
father to accept her former suitor, openly avows her new
fancy for Euphues. This leads to a rupture between
the two friends. But it soon appears that the fickle
fair has thrown over Euphues for a fresh adorer, named
Curio. Euphues falls into a fever of fury, shame, and
disappointed passion. He and Philautus shake hands
again, consoling themselves with the reflection that
friendship is more stable and more durable than love.
Then they separate — Euphues returns to study moral
and physical philosophy at Athens ; Philautus remains
to cure himself, as best he can, at Naples. Euphues,
in his own university, applies himself with zeal to
serious learning, and is soon so strengthened against
passion that he writes * a cooling card for Philautus and
all fond lovers.' This he sends his friend, together
with a discourse upon the education of young men, a
refutation of atheism, and other products of his fruitful
brain — in short, epistolary essays. These terminate
the first part of the book. In the second, Lyly brings
Euphues and Philautus to England. He describes the
discourse they held on shipboard, to keep off sea-
sickness and ennui ; their landing, and their visit to
Fidus, an old bee-master of Kent Fidus has a long-
winded love story, tale within tale, of his own to tell.
After hearing this the friends reach London, where
Philautus falls in and out of love two or three times,

502 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

and at last is married to a lady whom he calls his
Violet Euphues leaves him happily settled in Eng-
land, and concludes with a neatly worded panegyric of
Elizabeth and her Court, entitled * Euphues* Glass for
Europe;

II.

Such is the slender thread of narrative on which
Lyly strung his multitudinous reflections — some com-
monplace, some wise, some whimsical, some quaint,
but all relating to the inexhaustibly attractive themes
of love and conduct. The story lacks definite outline
and strong colouring, but it was of a kind which won
acceptance in that age. The popularity of Greene's
novels and Sidney's * Arcadia ' is not less inexplicable
to a modern reader than the fascination exercised by
* Euphues.' The thought — except, perhaps, in one
tractate upon education, entitled * Euphues and his
Ephoebus ' — is rarely pregnant or profound. Yet Lyly's
facile handling of grave topics, his casuistry of motives
and criticism of life, exactly suited the audience he had
in view. He tells us that he meant his * Euphues ' for
gentlewomen in their hours of recreation. * I am con-
tent that your dogs lie in your laps, so *' Euphues "
may be in your hands ; that when you shall be weary
in reading of the one, you may be ready to sport with
the other.* And again : **' Euphues" had rather lie
shut in a lady s casket than open in a scholar's study.'
In days when there were no circulating libraries and
magazines, * Euphues ' passed for pleasant and instruc-
tive reading. The ladies, for whom it was written, had

LITERARY AIM OF ' E UP HUES: 503

few books except romances of the Round Table and
the Twelve Peers ; and these, though stimulating to
the imagination, failed to exercise the wit and under-
standing. The loves of Lancelot and Tristram were
antiquated and immoral. The doughty deeds of Pala-
dins suited a soldiers rather than a damsel's fancy.
Lyly supplied matter light enough to entertain an idle
moment, yet sensible and wholesome. He presented
in an English dress the miscellaneous literature of
the Italians, combining Alberti's ethical disquisitions
with Sannazzaro's narratives, but avoiding the licen-
tiousness which made Painter s translations from the
Novellieri an object of just suspicion. Furthermore,
he popularised some already celebrated writings of a
meritorious but affected Spanish author, and succeeded
in presenting all this miscellaneous matter in a piquant
form, which passed for originality of style. The love
tales of Euphues, Philautus, and Fidus, served for polite
fiction. The discourses on marriage, education, politics,
and manners, conveyed some such diluted philosophy
as ladies of the present day imbibe from magazines and
newspapers. The inartistic blending of these divers
elements in a prolix, languidly conducted romance, did
not offend against the taste of Lyly's age.

III.

The success of this book was sudden and astounding.
Two editions of the first part were exhausted in 1579,
a third in 1580, a fourth in 1581. Between that date
and 1636 it was nine times reprinted. The second
part enjoyed a similar run of luck. How greedily its

504 SHAKSPEKE'S PREDECESSORS.

pages were devoured, is proved by the extreme rarity
of the earliest editions. After 1636 this gale of popu-
larity suddenly dropped. The * Euphues ' of ' eloquent
and witty John Lyly/ as Meres styled its author ; the

* Euphues,' which Webbe had praised for * singular
eloquence and brave composition of apt words and
sentences,' for * fit phrases, pithy sentences, gallant
tropes, flowing speech, plain sense ; ' the ' Euphues,'
which won for Lyly from John Eliot the epithet of

* raffineur de TAnglais ; ' the * Euphues,' which, in the
words of Edward Blount, had taught our nation a new
English, and .so enthralled society that ' that Beauty in
Court which could not parley Euphuism, was as little
regarded as she which now there speaks not French ; '
this * Euphues,' the delight of ladies and the school of
poets, passed suddenly out of fashion, and became a
byword for false taste and obsolete absurdity. Histo-
rians of literature joined in condemning without reading
it Sir Walter Scott essayed a parody, which proved
his ignorance of the original. At length in 1868,
nearly three centuries after its first appearance and
sudden triumph, nearly two centuries and a half after
its last issue and no less sudden loss of popularity,
English students received a scholarly reprint from the
hands of Professor Arber.

Those who peruse this volume will be inclined to
moralise on fashion ; to wonder how a work so sig-
nally devoid of vivid interest excited such enthusiasm,
or became the object of such vehement abuse. The
truth is that, besides the novelty of his performance,
on which I have already dwelt, Lyly owed his great
success to what we recognise as the defects of his

EUPHUISM, 505

Style. When literary popularity is based on faults
accepted by the bad taste of an epoch for transcendent
merits, it is foredoomed to a decline as rapid as its up-
rise, and to reaction as powerful as the forces which
promoted it. Euphues entranced society in the six-
teenth century, because our literature, in common with
that of Italy and Spain and France, was passing
through a phase of affectation, for which Euphuism
was the national expression. It corresponded to some-
thing in the manners and the modes of thinking
which prevailed in Europe at that period. It was the
English type of an all but universal disease. There
would have been Euphuism, in some form or other,
without Euphues ; just as the so-called aesthetic move-
ment of to-day might have dispensed with its Bun-
thorne, and yet have flourished. Lyly had the
fortune to become the hero of his epoch's follies,
to fix the form of fashionable affectation, and to find
the phrases he had coined in his study, current on the
lips of gentlemen and ladies.

Euphuism not only coloured the manners of polite
society, but it also penetrated literature. We trace
it, or something very like it, in the serious work of
Sidney and of Shakspere ; in the satires of Nash and
the conceits of Donne ; in the theological lucubrations
of Puritan divines and the philosophical rhapsodies of
Sir Thomas Browne. The specific affectations of
the Court might be satirised by Shakspere or by
Jonson ; yet neither Jonson nor Shakspere was free
from mannerisms, of which Lyly's style was only sym-
ptomatic. Sidney is praised for avoiding its salient
blemishes ; but Sidney revelled in conceits and disser-

5o6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

tations on romantic topics, which a modern student
scarcely thinks it worth his while to separate from
Euphuism. Perched on the pinnacle of history and
criticism, at the distance of three centuries, we are
able to confound Lyly with his censors, and to perceive
clearly that the purest among his contemporaries were
tarred with the same pitch. It is only the mediocrity
of his genius, combined with his good or evil luck in
producing an eponymous work of fiction, which renders
him conspicuous. He helped to ' fish the murex up,'
and dyed the courtly wardrobe with its purple. This
gives Euphuism real importance, and forces us to ask
ourselves exactly what it was.

IV.

The medieval mind delighted in allegories, sym-
bolism, scholastic distinctions. Science was unknown.
Men ascribed strange potencies to plants and minerals
and living creatures. The Bestiaries of the convents
set forth a system of zoology, invented for edification.
No one cared to ascertain what a thing really was.
It sufficed to discover some supposed virtue in the
thing, or to extract from it some spiritual lesson.
When the Revival of Learning began in Italy,
students transferred their attention from theology
and scholastic logic to classical literature ; but they
could not shake off the medieval modes of think-
ing. The critical faculty was still dormant. Every
ancient author had equal value in their eyes. A
habit was formed of citing the Greeks and Romans
upon all occasions, parading a facile knowledge of

PETRARCH/STIC MANNERISM, 507

their books, and quoting anecdotes from antique his-
tory without regard for aptness of application. The
quibbling of the schoolmen was transferred to scholar-
ship and literature. To idle exercise in logic suc-
ceeded empty exercise in rhetoric. At the same time,
a few great writers founded modern literature. Petrarch
and Boccaccio were by no means free from medieval
mannerisms. But each, in his own line, stood in a
direct relation to real life, and formed a style of dignity
and grace. The imitation of the ancients became
gradually more intelligent ; and at the opening of
the sixteenth century Italy could boast a literature
in Latin and the vulgar tongue, eminent for variety,
admirable for artistic purity and beauty. At this point
a retrograde impulse made itself felt. The Academies
began to imitate the faults without the saving graces
of their predecessors. Petrarch had shunned common-
place by periphrasis and metaphor. The Petrarchisti
prided themselves on that ' wonderful art which adorns
each thing by words appropriate to others.' When
they praised a woman, they called * her head fine gold
or roof of gold ; her eyes, suns, stars, sapphires, nest
and home of love ; her cheeks, now snow and roses,
now milk and fire ; rubies, her lips ; pearls, her teeth ;
her throat and breast, now ivory, now alabaster.'^
Purity of form, propriety of diction, truth to nature,
sincerity of presentation, were sacrificed to the manu-
facture of conceits. The poet who produced the
quaintest verbal conundrums passed for the best wit
Prose style was infected with antithesis. To be sen-
tentious about nothing, copious in mythological allu-

^ Speron Sperone. See my Renaissance in Italy ^ vol. v. p. 255.

5o8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

sion, curious in learning, covered poverty of thought
and excused vulgarity of feeling. Writers, who
scorned the pedantry of academicians, and sought to
take the world by storm — men of Aretino's stamp,
Doni, Albicante, Franco, Vergerio — played upon these
literary vices. No book, says Doni in his * Marmi,'
has a chance of success, if it appears in modest style
with a plain indication of its subject You must coin
attractive titles, * The Pumpkin,' or * The Cobbler s
Caprices/ or * The Hospital of Fools,' or * The Syn-
agogue of Ignoramuses,' to carry off your ethical dis-
courses. If you want to sell an invective, you must
invent for it some bizarre superscription, as, for in-
stance : * The Earthquake of Doni, the Florentine,
with the Ruin of a Great Bestial Colossus, the Anti-
christ of our Age.' ^ Then folk will read you. Aretino,
who thoroughly understood the public, proved his
originality by creating a new manner, brassy and
meretricious. Antithesis followed antithesis ; forced
metaphors, outrageous similes, hyperbolical periphrases,
monstrous images, made up a style of clap-trap only
to be pardoned by the author s ruffianly power. The
manner spread like wild-fire. Campanella in his prison
punned upon his surname and peculiarly shaped skull,
rejoicing in the sobriquet of * Settimontano Squilla,'
or the ' Seven-hilled Bell' Bruno uttered his philo-
sophy in a jargon of conceits, strained allegories, and
allusive metaphors, which is all but incomprehensible.
One of his metaphysical works, dedicated to Sir Philip
Sidney, bears this title : ' Lo Spaccio della Bestia
Trionfante.' Another is styled : ' Gli Eroici Furori.'

^ See Renaissance in Italy^ vol. v. pp. 95, 96.

VARIED AFFECTATION. 509

It had become impossible for sage or theologian,
satirist or pedant, essayist or versifier, to express him-
self with classical propriety or natural directness.
Marini, an indubitable poet, consecrated this aberra-
tion of taste in his * Adone,' the marvel of the age, the
despair of less authentic bards.

It was precisely at this point of its development
that Italian literature exercised the widest and deepest
influence in Europe. The French, the Spaniards, and
the English rushed with the enthusiasm of b^inners
into imitation of Italian vices. An affectation, drawn
from many diverse sources, from medieval puerility
and humanistic pedantry, from the sentimentalism of
the Petrarchisti and the cynical audacities of Aretino,
from the languors of Marini and Doni's impudent bids
for popularity — an affectation bred in the premature
decay of the renascence, invaded every country where
Italian culture penetrated. The masterpieces of pure
literature, the antique classics, the poems of Petrarch
and Ariosto, the histories of Guicciardini and Machia-
velli, received due studious attention. But while these
were studied, the mannerisms of feebler men, the faults
of contemporaries, were copied. It was easier to catch
the trick of an Aretino or a Marini than to emulate
the style of a Tasso or a Castiglione. Still, what in Italy
had been to some extent a sign of decadence and
exhaustion, became, when it was carried to barbarian
shores, a petulant parade of youthful vigour. The
effete literature of Florence and Venice generated
this curious hybrid, which was enthusiastically cul-
tivated on the virgin soils of France and Spain and
England. It there produced new rarities and deli-

5IO SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

cacies of divinest flavour ; monstrosities also, out-
doing in extravagance the strangest of Italian species.
Where the national genius displayed a robust natural
growth, as in England for example, literature was only
superficially affected — in the prose of Lyly, the elegies
of Donne, the slender Euphuistic thread that runs
in iron through Marlowe, in silver through Shakspere,
in bronze through Bacon, in more or less inferior
metal through every writer of that age. Teutonic and
Celtic qualities absorbed while they assimilated, domi-
nated while they suffered, that intrusive Southern
element of style. Yet the emphasis added to spon-
taneous expression by its foreign accent was so marked
that no historian can venture to neglect it. The
romantic art of the modern world did not spring, like
that of Greece, from an ungarnered field of flowers.
Troubled by reminiscences of the past and by re-
ciprocal influences from one another, the literatures of
modem Europe came into existence with composite
dialects, obeyed confused canons of taste, exhibited
their adolescent vigour with affected graces, showed
themselves senile in their cradles.

In France the post-Italian affectation ran its course
through two marked phases, from Du Bellay and Du
Bartas to the Pr6cieuses of the H6tel Rambouillet
In Spain it engendered the poetic diction of Calderon,
who called the birds in heaven 'winged harps of gold ;'
and it expired in that esiilo culto of Gongora, which
required a new system of punctuation to render its
constructions intelligible, and a glossary to explain its
metaphors and mythological allusions. Of all parts of
Europe, Spain perhaps produced the most extravagant

A 'LUES LITERARIA) 511

specimens of this preposterous mannerism. In*England
it first appeared as Euphuism, passing on"^ into the me-
taphysical conceits of Cowley and the splendid pedan-
tries of Sir Thomas Browne.^

This affectation, which I have attempted to trace to
its source in Italy, took somewhat different form in each
country and in every writer. But its elementary con-
ditions were the same. From the Middle Ages sur-
vived a love of allegory and symbolism, the habit
of scholastic hair-splitting, and the romantic senti-
ment which we associate with chivalry. Humanism
introduced the uncritical partiality for classical ex-
amples and citations, the abuse of mythology, and
the sententious prolixity which characterise this literary
phase in all its manifestations. The Petrarchisti gave
currency to a peculiar conceited style, definable as the
persistent effort to express one thing in terms of
another, combined with a patient seeking after finished
form. The Venetian school of Aretino and his fol-
lowers set the fashion of bizarrerie in titles, effect by
antithesis, verbal glare and glitter. Marini, preceded

* It has been my object in the foregoing paragraphs to describe in
general the origins of that literary affectation, which appears under many
forms and species in Italy, Spain, France, and England, upon the close of
the Renaissance — species known to us apart, and designated by the
names of eminent or fashionable writers ; of Petrarch and Marini,
Montemayor and Gongora, Ronsard and Du Bartas, Lyly and Cowley.
I have dwelt upon the generic rather than the specific characteristics of
this lues literaria^ because I think Euphuism may fairly claim to be a
separate type. But I must also here profess my belief in the very close
dependence of Lyl/s style and matter upon the work of the Spanish
author Guevara, without whom, as Dr. Landmann has abundantly proved,
Euphuism would certainly not have crystallised into its well-known and
characteristic form. In some important respects the species Euphuism^
strictly so called, is immediately derived from Guevara's purer and
weightier mannerism. See Dr. Landmann's Euphuismus^ Giessen, 1881,
and his article in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions^ 1880-2.

512 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

by the author of the * Pastor Fido/ brought the specific
note of the new literary style — its effort to be rich and
rare, at the expense of taste, by far-fetched imagery,
surprises, striking metaphors, and unexpected in-
genuity in language — into the domain of poetry. In
his work it dropped much of its medieval and pedantic
apparatus. It shone before the entranced eyes of
Europe as an iridescent marvel, on which the intellect
and fancy fed with inexhaustible delight The un-
explored riches of modern literatures, exulting in their
luxuriance, and envying the fame of Greece and Rome,
tempted writers to extravagant experiments in lan-
guage. Imagination itself was young, and ran riot in
the prodigality of unexhausted forces.

Euphuism, after this preamble, may be defined as
a literary style used by Lyly in his prose works, and
adopted into the language of polite society. It is
characterised by a superficial tendency to allegory ; by
the abuse of easy classical erudition ; by a striving
after effect in puns, conceits, and plays on words ; by
antithesis of thought and diction, carried to a weari-
some extent, and enforced by alliterative and parisonic
use of language ; and, finally, by sententious prolixity
in the display of commonplace reflections. Lyly's
euphuism is further and emphatically distinguished by
the reckless employment of an unreal natural history for
purposes of illustration. This constitutes what may
be termed the keynote of his affectation. He seems
to have derived it in the first place from Pliny ; but
also from the Bestiaries and Lapidaries of the Middle
Ages, with indiscriminate reference to Herodotus and
Mandeville, and an idle exercise of his inventive

LVLY'S NATURAL HISTORY, 513

fancy. To animals, plants, stones, &c. he attributes
the most absurd properties and far-fetched virtues,
applying these to point his morals and adorn his tales.
' Let the falling out of friends,' he writes, ' be the
renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble
the bones of the lion, which lying still and not moved
begin to rot, but being stricken one against another,
break out like fire and wax green.' Page after page
of his prose runs on after this fashion ; empty, vague,
prolix, decorated with preposterous examples. It
would be a nice task for idle antiquarian research to
discover whether there are or are not sources in
medieval erudition for such statements as the follow-
ing:

* As the fire-stone in Liguria, though it be quenched
with milk, yet again it is kindled with water, or as the
roots of Anchusa, though it be hardened with water,
yet it is made soft with oil.'

' As the precious stone Sandrasta hath nothing in
outward appearance but that which seemeth black,
but being broken poureth forth beams like the sun.'

* As by basil the scorpion is engendered, and by
the means of the same herb destroyed ... or as the
salamander which being a long space nourished in the
fire, at the last quencheth it.'

* I lived, as the elephant doth by air, with the sight
of my lady.'

' Like the river in Arabia, which turneth gold to
dross, and dirt to silver.'

* As the dogs of Egypt drink water by snatches,
and so quench their thirst, and not hinder their
running.'

L L

514 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

The more sensible readers of Lyly's works seem to
have felt the tediousness of this fabulous natural history
no less than we do, though certainly the list of Vulgar
Errors concerning the fauna and flora of distant lands
was then a larger one than it is now. Drayton, pub-
lishing his poems in 1627, upon the eve of * Euphues' '
extinction, says of Sir Philip Sidney that he

Did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing then in use ;
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies.
Playing with words and idle similes ;
As the English apes and very zanies be
Of everything which they do hear and see,
So imitating his ridiculous tricks.
They spake and writ, all like mere lunatics.

Soon after the publication of ' Euphues,' Lyly
attached himself to the Court. In 1582 he was in the
service of Lord Burleigh, as appears from a letter of
apology written in the summer of that year. In 1590
he addressed a petition to the Queen, setting forth his
claims to notice, and adding, that ten years had elapsed
since * I was entertained, your Majesty's servant, by
your own gracious favour.* Lyly s avowed object in
following the Court was to gain the place of Master of
the Revels. He states in his petition that the rever-
sion of that office had been almost promised him.
With this aim in view he began to compose comedies,
methodically and elaborately flattering the Queen with
studied compliment and allegory. But notwithstanding
his efforts to please Elizabeth, in spite of lamentable

LIFE AT COURT. 515

appeals for recognition, he never succeeded in obtaining
the coveted post of honour and emolument It was
his doom :

To lose good nights that might be better spent,
To waste long days in pensive discontent,
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow,
To feed on hope, and pine with fear and sorrow.

That his plays were admired, that he was ' graced and
rewarded ' with fair speeches, was the utmost he could
compass. His last petition, dated 1593, gives forth a
wailing note of hope deferred and disappointment
'Thirteen years your Highness* servant; but yet
nothing ! Twenty friends, that though they say they
will be sure, I find them sure to be slow ! A thousand
hopes ; but all nothing ! A hundred promises ; but
yet nothing ! Thus casting up the inventory of my
friends, hopes, promises, and times, the summa totalis
amounteth to just nothing. . . . The last and the
least, that if I be born to have nothing, I may have a
protection to pay nothing ; which suit is like his that
having followed the Court ten years, for recompense of
his service committed a robbery, and took it out in a
pardon.' Lyly survived this petition some years, and
died in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

The inventor of Euphuism spoke from the heart
and plainly on his own affairs. His dramatic work
is also comparatively free from euphuistic affectation.
The soliloquies and monologues, indeed, are often
tainted with the author's mannerism. Antitheses and
classical allusions abound. All the characters, from
the highest to the lowest, use the same refined lan-
guage, and seem to have enjoyed a polite education.

L L2

5i6 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

But the dialogue is for the most part free in style, and
terse even to bareness. The lyrics are as neat and
delicate as French songs. Some of the scenes suggest
antique sculpture, or the subjects of engraved gems.
After making due allowance for the alloy of conceits,
which mingles with the finer ore of his production,
Lyly's style deserves to be called Attic.

In * Euphues ' he had given signal proof of his origin-
ality. His Comedies were no less new creations. No-
thing of the same sort had previously been known in
England. They combined the qualities of the Masque
and the Drama, interwove classical fable with allegory,
and made the whole work of art subservient to compli-
ment We cannot call them Comedies of character, of
intrigue, or of manners. They are devoid of plot, and
deficient in dramatic movement But the succession of
their scenes is brilliant, their dialogue sparkling, their
allegory interesting. The title under which they were
published in Blount's edition of 1632 sufficiently de-
scribes them. There they are termed Court Come-
dies. The curious rarity of their invention is well,
though euphuistically, characterised in the same editor's
panegyric on the author : ' The spring is at hand, and
therefore I present you a Lily growing in a Grove of
Laurels. For this poet sat at the sun's table. Apollo
gave him a wreath of his own bays, without snatching.
The lyre he played on had no borrowed strings.'

endimion: 517

VI.

Of the eight comedies ascribed to Lyly, * six were
first exhibited before the Queen's Majesty by the
children of her choir and the children of Paurs. Of
these six, four were founded upon classical fables ; but
the fables only served to veil allusions to the Queen.
Each piece forms a studied panegyric of her virtue,
beauty, chastity, and wisdom. In * Endimion * her
loftiness and unapproachable virginity are celebrated.
Spenser had already styled her Cynthia. So Lyly s
allegory was transparent, and Leicester was easily
identified with Endimion. * What thing,' cries Endi-
mion to his friend Eumenides, * what thing, my
mistress excepted, being in the pride of her beauty and
latter minute of her age, then waxeth young again ?
Tell me, Eumenides, what is he that having a mistress
of ripe years and infinite virtues, great honours and
unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might
grow tender again } getting youth by years and never-
decaying beauty by time ; whose fair face neither the
summer s blaze can scorch, nor the winter's blast chap,
nor the numbering of years breed altering of colours.
Such is my sweet Cynthia — whom time cannot touch,
because she is divine ; nor will offend, because she is

' It is certain, I think, that the MaitPs Metamorphosis was not Lyly*s
work. It bears marks of imitation of his style. But the lyrics are not in
his manner ; and the subject is handled with far greater dramatic freedom
than is usual with Lyly. The rhymed couplets in which a large portion
is composed, show the craftsmanship of a different school. We must
assign it to a younger playwright, working upon Lyl/s lines for the boy-
actors of S. Paul's. This comedy was printed anonymously in 1600, the
year of Lyly's death, and has been reprinted by Mr. A. H. Bullen,

5i8 SIIAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

delicate.' Tellus, who loves Endimion, and to whom
he has been privately contracted — the earthly mistress,
abandoned for his celestial lady — persuades a witch to
charm him into a deep sleep upon a bank of lunary.
There he slumbers forty years, till his friend Eumenides
discovers from an oracle in Thessaly that Cynthia's kiss
will bring him back to life. The great queen of the
night, hearing this among her ladies, deigns to visit
Endimion, and finds him grown in his long sleep from
comely youth to grizzled age. Cynthia stoops above
the bed of lunary, and speaks :

Cynthia, Although my mouth hath been heretofore as untouched
as my thoughts, yet now to recover thy life, though to restore thy
youth it be impossible, I will do that to Endimion which yet never
mortal man could boast of heretofore, nor shall ever hope for here-
after. (She kisseth him.)

Eumenides, Madam, he beginneth to stir.

Cynth, Soft, Eumenides ; stand still.

Eum, Ah, I see his eyes almost open.

Cynth, I command thee once again, stir not :
I will stand behind him.

Eum, Endimion, Endimion ! art thou deaf or dumb? Or hath
this long sleep taken away thy memory ? Ah ! my sweet Endimion,
seest thou not Eumenides, who for thy safety hath been careless
of his own content? Speak, Endimion, Endimion, Endimion !

Endimion, Endimion ? I call to mind such a name.

Eum, Hast thou forgotten thyself, Endimion ? Then do I not
marvel thou rememberest not thy friend !

Still Endimion will not be stirred from his dead
lethargy. Eumenides then points to Cynthia, and the
queen speaks :

Cynth, Endimion, speak, sweet Endimion, knowest thou not
Cynthia ?

End, O heavens, whom do I behold, fair Cynthia, divine
Cynthia ?

Cynth, I am Cynthia, and thou Endimion.

ALLEGORY OF ' ENDIMION: 519

End, Endimion? ^Vhat do I here? What, a grey beard?
Withered body ? Decayed hmbs ? And all in one night ?

Eum. One night? Thou hast slept here forty years, by what
enchantress as yet it is not known ; and behold, the twig to which
thou layedst thy head, is now become a tree ! Callest thou not
Eumenides to remembrance ?

End. Thy name I do remember by the sound ; but thy favour
I do not yet call to mind. Only divine Cynthia, to whom time,
fortune, death, and destiny are subject, I see and remember ; and
in all humility I regard and reverence.

Thus Endimion returns to consciousness; and when
the charm has been removed, and his youth has been
miraculously restored, the handsome shepherd concludes
the play with this courtly speech : * The time was,
madam, and is, and ever shall be, that I honoured your
highness above all the world ; but to stretch it so far
as to call it love^ I never durst.' He therefore resolves
to consecrate the whole of his life to the contemplation
of Cynthia's perfections.

Lyly warns his audience in the prologue that this
play is but *a tale of the Man in the Moon/ and
specially requests them not 'apply pastimes,' or, in
other words, to affix real names to his fancied characters.^
Yet this has since been done for him ; and it is highly
probable that Tellus was meant for Leicester's wife
Lady Sheffield, and Dipsas the witch for the Countess
of Shrewsbury.^ It is not impossible that the poet's
career at Court was injured by the application ot his
somewhat too transparent allegory.

* This use of the verb * to apply ' and of the noun * application * is
common enough in our dramatic authors. Numerous examples might
be adduced from Ben Jonson.

' See Mr. Halpin's essay in the Old Shakespeare Society's publi-
cations,

520 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

* Endimion * has no dramatic interest ; it is nothing
but a censer of exquisitely chased silver, full of incense,
to be tossed before Elizabeth upon her throne, with
Leicester and her ladies at her side. Yet the compli-
ment is never gross. The theme of purity in a divine
or royal maiden is one of the most delicate that art
can touch. Lyly has treated it with quaint and courtly
grace. The placidity of the piece seems well suited to
those childish actors, whose tender years and boyish
voices were more in harmony with Lyly's studied
diction and tranquil fancy than with the terrible
passion and heroic utterance of a Marlowe or a Shak-
spere. Hazlitt has praised the comedy with uncritical
extravagance ; he seems to have read it with the eyes
of Keats, exclaiming : * Happy Endimion ! faithful
Eumenides! divine Cynthia! Who would not wish
to pass his life in such a sleep — a long, long sleep,
dreaming of some fair heavenly goddess, with the moon
shining over his face and the trees growing silently
over his head ? ' This rapture is appropriate enough
to the myth of Endymion upon Mount Latmos, as we
see it sculptured on the bas-reliefs of old sarcophagi,
where the shepherd is a youth for ever sleeping and
for ever young, and the moon steps nightly from her
dragon-car to kiss her dearest. But it does not better
Lyly's comedy to pretend that he dreamed of Endymion
as Keats dreamed, or to fancy that these scenes were
presented with classical accuracy. In reading it, we
must picture to our mind a large low room in the
palace of Greenwich. The time is * New Years Day at
night/ The actors are the ' children of Paul's.' Candles

'MIDAS} 521

light the stage, in front of which are drawn silk curtains.
Elizabeth, in all her bravery of ruflfs and farthingales,
with chains and orders round her neck, and the sharp
smile on her mouth, is seated beneath a canopy of
state. Lords, ladies, and ambassadors watch her face,
as courtiers watch a queen. On the stage lies no
Hellenic shepherd in the bloom of youth, but a boy
attired in sylvan style to represent an aged man with
flowing beard. Cynthia — not the solitary maiden
goddess, led by Cupid, wafting her long raiment to the
breeze of night ; but a queen among her ladies, a boy
disguised to personate Elizabeth herself — bends over
him. And Endymion s dream, when he awakes, has
been no fair romance of love revealed in slumber, but
a vision of treason, envy, ingratitude, assassination,
threatening his sovereign.

VII.

' Midas ' is another Court Comedy on a classical
story, treated with even more obvious reference to
public events. Hazlitt, who often praises the right
things for wrong reasons, talks of being transported to
* the scene of action, to ancient Greece and Asia Minor.'
Lyly, according to this critic, succeeded in preserving
' the manners, the images, the traditions ' — as though
anybody knew what the traditions and manners of
prehistoric Phrygia may have been ! Local colour is
just what Lyly has not got, or sought to get, in * Midas.'
H is shepherds, who fancy that * the very reeds bow
down as though they listened to their talk,' are shep-

522 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

herds of the poet's fancy, gazing at reeds that might
grow and rustle on an English just as well as on a
Mysian common. The courtiers, kings, and clowns,
nay, the very gods, talk like English people ; and this
is their chief merit, for the English of their speech is
pure and undefiled. Lyly, in truth, is never classical
by imitation of the classics, but by a certain simplicity
of conception and purity of outline, which remind us
of antique workmanship. In this comedy Midas is an
unmistakable Philip II. The Lesbos upon which he
tries to lay his hand is England. The gift, which
brings a curse, conferred on him by Bacchus, is the
wealth of the West Indies, flowing into Spain and
paralysing her activity. The touch that turns all things
to gold, * the gold that thou dost think a god,' is Philip's
vain and ruinous reliance on his riches. The ass's
ears, which Midas cannot lose till he leaves Lesbos,
are his arrogance and folly. Whenever Midas speaks,
we read allusions to cruelties in the Low Countries, to
the Armada, to Spanish plots in England, to Philip's
aggressive policy in Europe. — * I have written my laws
in blood, and made my gods of gold. Have I not made
the sea to groan under the number of my ships ; and
have they not perished, that there was not two left to
make a number ? Have I not enticed the subjects of
my neighbour princes to destroy their natural kings ?
To what kingdom have I not pretended claim ? A
bridge of gold did I mean to make in that island where
all my navy could not make a breach. Have not all
treasons been discovered by miracle, not counsel ? Is
not the country walled with huge waves } '

For the sake of proving Lyly's political allusions, I

'SAP HO AND PHAO: 523

have singled out, perhaps, the prosiest passage in this
comedy. But the malice of making Philip utter a short
summary of his own crimes before the throne of his
triumphant sister-in-law is so crudely and effectively
direct, that the quotation yields a savour above the
choicest flowers of Euphuism.

In *Sapho and Phao' the poet shows a queen
enthralled by love for a poor ferryman. Venus made
Phao so fair that all who saw him doted on his beauty.
Sapho, the virgin queen of Sicily, gazed and sighed.
Venus herself, by Cupid's spite, was entangled in the
snare which she had spread for Sapho. Here, again,
the allegory is not hard to read ; and the end of
the comedy must have been flatteringly grateful to
Elizabeth, Sapho is released by Cupid from the pangs
in which she had a goddess for companion. Phao is
left to languish for her in hopeless and respectful
longing. His last words to his royal mistress — ' O
Sapho, thou hast Cupid in thine arms, I in my heart ;
thou kissest him for sport, I must curse him for spite :
yet will I not curse him, Sapho, whom thou kissest.
This shall be my resolution : wherever I wander, to be
as I were ever kneeling before Sapho ; my loyalty
unspotted, though unrewarded ' — this declaration of
everlasting service embodied the essence of that pas-
sionate homage and romantic adoration, that chival-
rous self-devotion and Platonic constancy, that blind
enchantment and enthusiastic worship, with which, as
with a phantom and vain show of happiness, the Queen
consoled her solitude. Some of the pictures in this
play are daintily conceited. Nothing in the Dresden
china style of antiquated compliment is prettier than

524 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

the first meeting of Sapho with Phao on the ferry-boat,
unless it is their conversation when he brings narcotic
herbs to soothe her into sleep :

Sapho. \Vhat herbs have you brought, Phao ?

Phao. Such as will make you sleep, madam, though they cannot
make me slumber.

•SI Why, how can you cure me when you cannot remedy yourself?

P. Yes, madam ; the causes are contrary. For it is only a dry-
ness in your brains that keepeth you from rest. But

•S But what ?

P, Nothing — but mine is not so.

.SI Nay, then I despair of help, if our disease be not all one.

P. I would our diseases were all one.

•SI It goes hard with the patient, when the physician is desperate.

P. Yet Medea made the ever-waking dragon to snort, when she,
poor soul, could not wink.

•SI Medea was in love, and nothing could cause her rest but
Jasoa

P. Indeed I know no herb to make lovers sleep, but hearts^
ease ; which because it groweth so high, I cannot reach for.

•SI For whom ?

P, For such as love.

•SI It stoopeth very low, and I can never stoop to it, that

P. That what ?

S. That I may gather it : but why do you sigh so, Phao ?

P. It is mine use, madam.

•SI It will do you harm, and me too : for I never hear one sigh,
but I must sigh also.

P. It were best then that your ladyship give me leave to be gone:
for I can but sigh.

S. Nay, stay, for now I begin to sigh, I shall not leave though
you begone. But what do you think best for your sighing, to take it
away?

P. Yew, madam.

S. Me?

P, No, madam ; yew of the tree.

S. Then will I love yew the better. And indeed it would make
me sleep too ; therefore all other simples set aside, I will simply use
only yew.

P. Do, madam ; for I think nothing in the world so good as yew,

S. Farewell for this time.

USE OF CLASSICAL MOTIVES. 525

The outrageous plays on words and stiff mannerism —
as of box hedges in an antiquated pleasance cut into
quaint shapes — which characterise the dialogue, do not,
to my sense at least, deprive it of a very piquant
charm.

The song of the love-sick queen is a fair, though
not a perfect, specimen of Lyly's lyric. Sapho, finding
herself alone, exclaims :

Ah, impatient disease of love, and goddess of love thrice unpitiful !
The eagle is never stricken with thunder, nor the olive with lightning;
and may great ladies be plagued with love ? O Venus, have I not
strawed thine altars with sweet roses? kept thy swans in clear
rivers ? fed thy sparrows with ripe com, and harboured thy doves
in fair house ?

Sleep will not visit her, and she lays her curse on Cupid
in these rhymes :

O cruel Love ! on thee I lay
My curse, which shall strike blind the day ;
Never may sleep with velvet hand
Charm thine eyes with sacred wand ;
Thy jailors shall be hopes and fears ;
Thy prison-mates, groans, sighs, and tears ;
Thy play to wear out weary times,
Fantastic passions, vows and rhymes.

VIII.

Lyly takes the same liberties with the story of
Sappho that he took with the legend of Endymion.
He chose to see in her a love-sick sovereign, whose
history might be pointed so as to flatter the Queen of
England. Beyond her name she has nothing in common
with the Lesbian poetess. In ' Alexander and Cam-
paspe ' he again touches on Greek history — showing

526 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

how noble a thing it was for the conqueror of the world
to prefer the toils of sovereignty to the delights of love.
Alexander, after taking Thebes, becomes enamoured
of his captive, the beautiful Campaspe. He makes
Apelles paint her portrait ; and Apelles loves her with
a warmth that conquers in her soul the love of
Alexander. The king, discovering their mutual passion,
generously betroths the lady to the painter, consoles
himself with Hephaestion's friendship, and marches
off with drum and fife to subdue Asia. The moral
must have been consoling to Elizabeth, who always
faltered between passion and her crown. This comedy,
though it is nothing but a dramatised anecdote, is, I
think, the best of Lyly s. He has caught something
of Plutarch's spirit, sympathising, as the English of
that age could do, with the martial greatness of
Alexander, the audacity of Alcibiades, the strong
resolves of Epameinondas or Timoleon. In the dia-
logues between Alexander and Diogenes, Lyly was
able to bring his own fencing style into appropriate
play. Careless, as usual, of Greek local colouring,
these combats of wit express the well-known episode
with terse and vivid fancy. There is something akin
to Shakspere's * Timon ' in the following :

Diog, Who calleth ?

Alex. Alexander ; how happened it that you would not come out
of your tub to my palace ?

D. Because it was as far from my tub to your palace, as from
your palace to my tub.

A. Why then, dost thou owe no reverence to kings ?

D. No.

A. Why so?

D. Because they be no gods.

A. They be gods of the earth.

'ALEXANDER AND CAMP ASP E: 527

D, Yea, gods of earth.

A, Plato is not of thy mind.

D, I am glad of it.

A. Why?

D, Because I would have none of Diogenes' mind but Diogenes.

A. If Alexander have anything that may pleasure Diogenes, let
me know, and take it.

D, Then take not from me that you cannot give me, the light of
the world.

A. What dost thou want ?

D, Nothing that you have.

A, I have the world at command.

D. And I in contempt.

A, Thou shalt live no longer than I will.

D, But I shall die whether you will or not.

A, How should one learn to be content ?

D, Unlearn to covet.

A, Hephaestion ! Were I not Alexander, I would wish to be
Diogenes.

Between Apelles and Campaspe there is a pretty
conceited dialogue on love. Apelles is showing the
pictures in his studio :

Camp, What counterfeit is this, Apelles ?
Apelles, This is Venus, the goddess of love.
C, What, be there also loving goddesses ?

A, This is she that hath power to command the very affections
of the heart.

C. How is she hired — by prayer, by sacrifice, or bribes ?

A, By prayer, sacrifice, and bribes.

C What i)rayer ?

A, Vows irrevocable.

C What sacrifice ?

A, Hearts ever sighing, never dissembling.

C. What bribes ?

A, Roses and kisses ; but were you never in love ?

C No, nor love in me.

A, Then have you injured many.

C How so ?

A. Because you have been loved of many.

C Flattered perchance of some.

528 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

A, It is not possible that a face so fair and a wit so sharp, both
without comparison, should not be apt to love.

C. If you begin to tip your tongue with cunning, I pray you
dip your pencil in colours ; and fall to that you must do, not to that
you would do.

The lyrics in the play are also among Lyly s best.
Apelles song, * Cupid and my Campaspe played,* is
too well known to need a word of commendation. But
this upon the notes of birds deserves to be recovered
from the somewhat tedious scene in which it lies
embedded :

What bird so sings, yet so does wail ?
Oh, *t is the ravished nightingale !
Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu, she cries ;
And still her woes at midnight rise.
Brave prick-song ! Who is 't now we hear ?
None but the lark, so shrill and clear ;
How at heaven's gates she claps her wings,
The mom not waking till she sings !
Hark, hark, with what a pretty throat
Poor Robin red-breast tunes his note !
Hark how the jolly cuckoos sing
Cuckoo, to welcome in the spring —
Cuckoo, to welcome in the spring !

IX.

• Gallathea * deserves to be classed with its author s
complimentary Court Comedies. The scene is laid in
Lincolnshire. The plot turns upon the yearly sacri-
fice of a virgin to the sea-monster Agar, in whom we
may discern the -^gir, or great wave of the river
H umber. Diana and her nymphs, Neptune and
Venus, Tityrus and Melibceus, with augurs, alchemists,
and English clowns, make up the motley list of per-
sonages. To discuss this play in detail would be

'CmALLATHIiA; 'LOVE'S AIETAAfOA'P/ZOSIS: 529

superfluous. But I cannot refrain from calling atten-
tion to the pretty underplot of Phyllida and Gallathea,
two girls disguised in male attire. Each thinks the
other is what she pretends to be, and falls in love with
her companion as a boy. The double confusion is
sustained with art and delicacy, considering the diffi-
culty of the motive ; and occasion is given for a suc-
cession of dialogues in Lyly*s quaintest style.^ His
peculiar charm of treatment might also be illustrated
by the scene in which Diana catches Cupid, cuts his
wings, burns his arrows, and exposes him bound
to the resentment of her nymphs.^ In clear sim-
plicity and perfect outline, this picture resembles an
intaglio cut to illustrate some passage of Anacreon.
The proclamation to the nymphs, who have been hurt
by Cupid, is written in three graceful lyric stanzas,
sung by solo voices and chorus : ^

O yes ! O yes ! has any lost

A heart which many a sigh hath cost ?

Is any cozened of a tear,

Which, as a pearl, disdain doth wear ?

Here stands the thief ! let her but come

Hither, and lay on him her doom.

The sentiment of virginity, which forms the moral
element in ' Gallathea,* refers to Elizabeth ; and the
same motive is worked up in ' Love's Metamorphosis.'
Cupid again runs wild, and makes mischief among the
nymphs of Ceres. Ceres in this play assumes the
same attitude as Diana in the former. The pastoral
subject once more furnishes the author with subjects
for idyllically classical episodes. Among these, the

• Act ii. sc. I, iii. 2, iv. 4, v. 3. ^ Act iii. so. 4.

^ Act iv. sc. 2.

M M

530 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

scene of the nymphs adorning a rustic altar on their
harvest holyday might be chosen for (quotation. ^ Ben
Jonson deigned to imitate it in ' Pan's Anniversary,'
as in his * Hue and Cry after Cupid ' he borrowed the
motive of Diana's proclamation from ' Gallathea.'

Two Comedies by Lyly remain to be briefly men-
tioned. One, called ' Mother Bombic/ is a tedious
love-farce representing English manners. It scarcely
deserves to be remembered, but for a pretty song
introduced by way of a duet :

O Cupid ! Monarch over kings I

Wherefore hast thou feet and wings ?

Is it to show how swift thou art,

When thou wouldst wound a tender heart ?

'Yhy wings being clipped, and feet Iield still,

Thy bow so many could not kill.

It is all one in Venus' wanton school
Who highest sits, the wise man or the fool I

Fools in lovers college

Have far more knowledge

To read a woman over,

Than a neat j)rating lover.

Nay, 't is confessed

That fools please women best I

* The Woman in the Moon ' was Lyly's first dra-
matic essay, as we read in the Prologue :

Remember all is but a poet's dream,
The first he had in Phoebus' holy bower,
But not the last, unless the first displea.sc.

Unlike his other Comedies, it is written throughout in
blank verse, and is free from euphuistic mannerism.
These peculiarities induce a doubt as to whether it
was really Lyly's composition. But since the play

^ Act i. so. 2,

* THE WOMAN IN THE MOON: 531

was printed with his name in 1597, three years before
his death, there is no sufficient reason to reject it from
the list of his works. We must rather suppose that
he had not formed his style when he made this earliest
attempt at writing for the stage. The allegory, if it
was meant to have any reference to the Queen, is
rather satirical than complimentary. Nature forms a
woman at the entreaty of the shepherds of Utopia.
She calls her Pandora, and dowers her with exceeding
beauty. The stars in jealousy shower vices on her
head. Saturn gives her churlishness ; Jupiter adds
pride ; Mars turns her to a vixen. Under the rule of
Sol, she marries Stesias, a shepherd of that land. In
the ascendency of Venus, she turns wanton. Mercury
fills her with cunning and falsehood. Cynthia makes
her, like herself, * new-fangled, fickle, slothful, foolish,
mad.* Stesias watches all these phases of her nature
with horror, and prays to be delivered from the tor-
ment of such a wife. Pandora at length is relegated
to the moon, and ordered to rule that inconstant lu-
minary, while Cynthia haunts the woods or dwells
with Pluto on the throne of Hecate. It seems singular
that Lyly should have made his ddbiit at Court with
this satire upon women and on Cynthia herself.^

* Were it not for the reason given above, I should be inclined to
reject The Woman in the Moon. If it was Lyly's first work, it must have
been written before 1 584 (the date of Campaspt^s publication). This was
very early in the development of dramatic blank verse. The title, again,
might pass for a parody of his Efulimion or The Man in the Moon ;
while the satire of the piece parodies his style of compliment to Elizabeth.
The title-page of 1597 adds, *as it was presented before her Highness.'
Yet Edward Blount, in his edition of Lyly's Six Court Comedies (1632),
neither included nor mentioned it. Love's Metamorphosis he also
excluded ; but in the first edition of this play (1601) it is not mentioned
as having been performed before the Queen.

M M 2

532 SMAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

As the first considerable poet who composed the
imaginative pieces which we call Court Comedies, Lyly
holds an important place in our dramatic history. He
invented a species. Both Shakspere and F'letcher knew
well how to profit by his discovery. Shakspere was just
twenty when 'Alexander and Campaspe* appeared.
He arrived in London, and began to work for the
stage soon after this date. Lyly exercised considerable
influence over his imagination and his method of pro-
duction. The earlier Shaksperian Comedies abound in
euphuistic dialogues, and display minute evidences of
euphuistic studies. Beatrice and Benedick, Timon
and Apemantus, can be traced by no uncertain method
to the poet's early admiration for John Lyly. Dog-
berry owes something to the Watch in * Endimion ;'
the fairies of * The Merry Wives of Windsor ' owe
even more to a catch-song in that comedy. The
confused sexes and complicated loves of Phyllida and
Gallathea reappear in * As You Like It' Lyly's lark-
note from * Campaspe ' sounds again in * Cymbeline.'
The elder playwright had styled two of his Comedies
(*Sapho' and 'The Woman in the Moon') dreams.
The younger gave the world a masterpiece in the
romantic style of Comedy, when he produced his
• Midsummer Night's Dream.'

Lyly was emphatically a discoverer. He dis-
covered euphuism, and created a fashionable affecta-
tion, which ran its course of more than twenty years.
He discovered the dialogue of repartee in witty prose.

LVLY'S ORIGIXAUTY. 533

He discovered the ambiguity of the sexes, as a motive
of dramatic curiosity. He discovered what effective
use might be made of the occasional lyric, as an ad-
junct to dramatic action. He discovered the sug-
gestion of dramatic dreaming. He discovered the
combination of Masque and Drama, which gave rise
to the Courtly or Romantic Comedy.

Shakspere bettered Lyly's best, and used his dis-
coveries with such artistic freedom, such poetic su-
premacy, that we are tempted to forget the quaint
petitioner at Court who 'fished the murex up.' It is
the duty, however, of historic criticism to indicate
origins. And in the study of Shakspere we are bound
to remember that Lyly preceded him ; just as when we
estimate the greatness of Michel Angelo in Rome, we
have to turn our eyes back upon Ghirlandajo and
Signorelli.

534 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

CHAPTER XIV.

GREENE, PEELE, NASH, AND LODGE.

I. Playwrights in Possession of the Stage before Shakspere — The Scholar-
Poets — Jonson's Comparison of Shakspere with his Peers — The
Me«ining of those Lines— Analysis of the Six Scholar- Poets. — IL
Men of Fair Birth and Good Education — The Four Subjects of this
Study. — III. The Romance of Robert Greene's Life— His Autobio-
graphical Novels — His Miserable Death — The Criticism of his
Character — His Associates. — IV. Greene's Quarrel with Shakspere and
the Playing Companies— His Vicissitudes as a Playwright — His
Jealousy. — V. Greene's transient Popularity — Euphuistic Novels —
Specimens of his Lyrics— Facility of Lyric Verse in England. — VL
(jreene's Plays betray the Novelist — None survive from the Period
before Marlowe — * James IV. of Scotland ' — Its Induction — The Cha-
racter of Ida — * Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay' — Florid Pedantry a
Mark of Greene's Style. — VII. Peele — Campbell's Criticism — His
Place among Contemporaries — * Edward 1.'-* Battle of Alcazar' —
*01d Wives' Tale'— Milton's 'Comus'— 'The Arraignment of Paris'
— * David and Bethsabe' — Non-Dramatic Pieces by Peele. — VIII.
Thomas Nash — The Satirist — His Ouarrel with Harvey — His
Description of a Bohemian Poet's Difficulties —The Isle of Dogs —
His Part in * Dido, Queen of Carthage ' — * Will Summer's Testament'
— Nash's Songs.— IX. Thomas Lodge—His Life — His Miscellaneous
Writings—* Wounds of Civil War.'— X. The Relative Value of these
Four Authors.

When Shakspere left Stratford-upon-Avon for London,
and began his career as actor and arranger of old
plays for the Lord Chamberlain s Servants, a group of
distinguished scholar-poets held possession of the
stage. The date of this event, so memorable in
modern literary history, cannot be fixed with certainty.
But we may refer it with probability to the year 1585.

THE SCHOLAR-PLAYWRIGHTS, 535

Before 1600 Shaksperc had already shown himself the
greatest dramatist of the romantic school, not only by
the production but also by the publication of his earlier
comedies and tragedies. In that period of fifteen
years, between 1585 and 1600, the men of whom I
speak either died or left off writing for the theatre.
They were Robert Greene, George Peele, Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nash, and Thomas
Kyd. Greene died in 1592, Marlowe in 1593, Peele
in 1597, Kyd not later than 1594. Nash produced his
only extant play in 1592, and died soon after 1600.
The tragedy by which Lodge is best known as a play-
wright, was printed in 1594. He exchanged literature
for medicine, and practised as a physician until his
death in 1625. Lyly, it will be remembered, died soon
after 1600.

These are the playwrights with whom Ben Jonson,
in his famous elegy, thought fit to compare Shakspere
— not, as it seems to me, in spite, but because they
were contemporaries. William Basse, writing on the
same occasion, bade Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont
lie somewhat closer, each to each, in order to make
room for Shakspere in their * threefold, fourfold tomb.'
Jonson says he will not use a similar rhetorical con-
trivance ; for Shakspere is * a monument without a
tomb,' living as long as his book lives, as long as there
are men to read and praise him. Then he proceeds :

That I not mix thcc so, my brain excuses,
I mean with j^reat, but disproportioned Muses ;
l^'or if I thought my judgment were of years,
1 should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lily outshine.
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe^s mighty line.

536 SHAKSPKRE'S PREDECESSORS.

That he meant no disparagement to Shakspere is
manifest from his immediately calling upon ^Eschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, on Aristophanes, and on the
tragic and comic poets of Rome, to rise and admire
Shakspere's masterpieces in both kinds. To time
Shakspere is no tributary, nor are his works subject
to comparisons based on considerations of chronology
or nationality :

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
A\nien, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm !

I have dwelt upon this elegy, not merely to disprove
the false inference which some have drawn from it to
Jonson's disadvantage, but also to show how a great
contemporary poet regarded Shakspere's relation to
his comrades in the dramatic art. If Shakspere is to
be judged by * years,' by chronological parallelism,
says Jonson, he must be compared with that group of
playwrights of whom Lyly, Marlowe, and Kyd are
representatives. But Shakspere is amenable to no
such jurisdiction. He belongs to the world and to all
ages. The incarnation of his spirit at that precise
moment is a matter of indifference.

The group of six dramatists enumerated above
must further be distinguished. Marlowe stands apart,
as a vastly superior genius, the true founder of Shak-
sperian drama, a pioneer and creator in the highest
sense. Kyd is separated from the rest by the com-
parative insignificance of what remains to us of his

iiRKEXE'S COTERIE. 537

work. Greene heads a little coterie of writers bound
together by ties of personal comradeship, and animated
by a common spirit. Greene, Peele, Nash, and Lodge
attach themselves to the past rather than the future.
They submit to Marlowe's unavoidable dictatorship,
and receive him into their society. But they belong
to a school which became doubly antiquated in their
lifetime. Marlowe outshone them ; and Shakspere, as
they were uneasily conscious, was destined to eclipse
them altogether. I propose, therefore, to treat now of
these four friends, having already given a word to Kyd
in isolation, while I reserve a separate study for the
greatest poet of the group. This method conforms to
the evolution of the Drama. But it has the dis-
advantage, of anticipating what properly belongs to
the criticism of Marlowe. He revolutionised the
English stage during Greene s ascendency, and forced
his predecessors to adapt their style to his inventions.

II.

The men of letters who form the subject of this
study were respectably born and highly educated.
They prided themselves on being gendemen and
scholars, Masters of Arts in both Universities. Robert
Greene was the son of well-to-do citizens of Norwich,
where he was born perhaps about the year 1550.^ He
took his Bachelors degree at Cambridge in 1578, and
passed Master in 1583. George Peele was a gentle-
man of Devonshire, born about 1558, instructed in
the rudiments at Christs Hospital, elected Student

* This date is quite uncertain.

538 SUA KSPERE '\ PREDECESSi )A\S.

of Christ Church in 1573, and admitted Bachelor of
Arts in 1577. While still at Oxford, he acquired con-
siderable literary reputation, and was praised by Dr.
Gager — no mean judge — for his English version of an
' Iphigeneia/ Thomas Lodge was the second son of
Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London, by his
wife Anne, a daughter of Sir William Laxton. Bom
in 1557, he took his degree at Oxford in 1577, and
entered the Society of Lincoln's Inn next year. Being
of a roving nature. Lodge never settled down to litera-
ture. After wasting the time which ought to have
been given to law studies, he joined the expeditions of
Captain Clarke and Cavendish, visited the Canary
Islands, and penned a fashionable romance in the
Straits of Magellan. On his return to England he
adopted medicine as a profession, studied at Avignon,
and established himself as a practitioner in London.
Upon his title-pages he was always careful to describe
himself * Thomas Lodge of Lincoln's Inn Gentleman.'
Greene assumed the style of * Magister utriusque
Academiee,' and Pcele insisted on his Master of Arts
degree. Thomas Nash, descended from an honour-
able family in Herefordshire, was born at Lowestoft in
1567. He took his degree at Cambridge in 1585, and
after travelling in Italy, came up to London, where we
find him engaged in literary work with Greene about
the year 1587.

Unlike Lyly, these four friends did not attach
themselves to the Court. They worked for book-
sellers and public theatres, selling their compositions,
and living on the produce of their pen They seem
to have been diverted from more serious studies and a
settled career by the attractions of Bohemian life in

BOHEMIAN LIFE. 539

London. What we know of their biography, proves
how fully some of them deserved the stigma for
vagrancy, loose living, and profanity, which then at-
tached to players and playwrights. Excluded from
respectable society, depending on the liberality of
booksellers and managers, with no definite profession,
enrolled in no acknowledged guild or corporation, they
passed their time at taverns, frequented low houses of
debauchery, and spent their earnings in the company
of thieves and ruffians. In this general description it
would not be quite safe to insert the name of Thomas
Lodge, though we may presume that he shared in the
amusements, and possibly also, if we ascribe biographical
value to his * Alarum against Usurers,' in the pecuniary
troubles of his literary friends. But Lodge was almost
too scrupulous to keep aloof from the set before the
public, describing himself as * Gentleman ' and * of
Lincoln's Inn.' From the degradation which then
attached to professional literature no one did so much to
elevate the playwright s calling as Shakspere. He found
it sunk below contempt, not only in the estimation of
Puritans, but also in fact, patent to every observer of
the lives of men like Marlowe, Greene, and Peele.
Styling themselves scholars, and boasting their acade-
mical degrees, they chose a theatrical career because
of its lawlessness and jollity. Shakspere came from
Stratford with no such pretensions, adopted the stage
as a profession, and diijnified it by his honest labour.^

* Notice the curious praise bestowed upon Shakspere for respect-
ability by Chettlc in his Kitul-Harts l^rennie. He apologises for having
printed some offensive passages in (ircene's posthumous Groats^vorth
of f f7/, and distinctly asserts Shaksperc's superiority to the Bohemian
playwrights. (2uoted by Dyce in his edition of Marlowe (1858), p. xxix.

540 SHAh'SPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

III.

The romance of Greene s life has been often told ;
but it so exactly illustrates the conditions under which
our playwrights at this epoch laboured, that I cannot
omit to pass it in review. The details are gathered
not only from uncontradicted statements of his literary
enemies, but also from his own autobiographical writ-
ings, * Never top Late,' ' A Groatsworth of Wit,' and
' The Repentance of Robert Greene/ Laboriously
pieced together from the extracts furnished by Alex-
ander Dyce, and illustrated by gleanings from con-
temporary tracts, the record of Greene's brief career
and miserable end may be presented with some com-
pleteness.

After taking his degree as Bachelor of Arts in
1578, Greene left England, persuaded by some college
associates, to wander over Spain and Italy. * For being
at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as
lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of
my youth ; who drew me to travel into Italy and Spain,
in which places I saw and practised such villany as is
abominable to declare.' His early friends and comrades
are described in the following sentence : * Being then
conversant with notable braggarts, boon companions,
and ordinary spendthrifts, that practised sundry super-
ficial studies, I became as a scion grafted into the
same stock, whereby I did absolutely participate of
their nature and qualities.' When he returned to
England he took up his residence again at Cambridge,
' ruffling out in silks, in the habit of malcontent, and

GREENE'S ADVENTURES, 54!

seeming so discontent that no place would please me
to abide in, nor no vocation cause me to stay myself
in/ What he had learned upon his journeys, he now
applied in his own country. * Being new-come from
Italy (where I learned all the villanies under the
heavens) I was drowned in pride, whoredom was my
daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my
only delight/ He extracted money from his father's
purse 'by cunning sleights,' and worked upon his
mother s fondness, * who secretly helped me to the oil
of angels/ Having taken his Masters degree, he
made his way to London. At first he was received by
friends as a young man of promise ; but he soon
abandoned these for evil company. * Where, after I
had continued some short time and driven myself out
of credit with sundry of my friends, I became an author
of plays, and a penner of love pamphlets, so that I soon
grew famous in that quality, that who for that trade
grown so ordinary about London as Robin Greene ?
Young yet in years, though old in wickedness, I began
to resolve that there was nothing bad that was profit-
able : whereupon I grew so rooted in all mischief that
I had as great delight in wickedness as sundry hath in
godliness, and as much felicity I took in villany as
others had in honesty.* The vilest fellows were his
companions ; the alehouse and the brothel were his
haunts. * After I had wholly betaken me to the penning
of plays (which was my continual exercise), I was so
far from calling upon God that I seldom thought on
God, but took such delight in swearing and blasphem-
ing the name of God that none could think otherwise
of me than that I was the child of perdition.' He

542 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

lived upon his pen, and entertained a tribe of parasites
with the fruits of his literary labours, * Now famoused
for an arch- play-making poet, his purse, like the sea,
sometimes swelled, anon like the same sea fell to a low
ebb ; yet seldom he wanted, his labours were so well
esteemed. He had shift of lodgings, where in every
place his hostess writ up the wofull remembrance of him,
his laundress and his boy ; for they were ever his in
household, besides retainers in sundry other places.
His company were lightly the lewdest persons in the
land, apt for pilfery, perjury, forgery, or any villany.
Of these he knew the cast to cog at cards, cosen at
dice ; by these he learned the legerdemain of nips,
foists, conycatchers, crosbiters, lifts, high-lawyers, and
all the rabble of that unclean generation of vipers.*
These companions, as he says in another place, 'came
still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing,
carousing, and surfeiting with me all day long.'

Hitherto I have made Greene tell his own tale,
breathlessly and .disjointedly, but with palpable sin-
cerity, in his own words. Though it is very probable
that, with a novel-writer's tendency to the sensational
in literature, he somewhat overdrew the picture of his
vices, yet this picture is too vivid to be mistaken for
fiction. What Ascham and Howell wrote about the
injury to English youth from foreign travel, finds
a striking illustration in Greene's confessions. De-
moralised by bad associates at college, trained to
infamy in the slums of Florence and the base quarters
of Venice, he returned to England, the diavolo in-
carnato of the famous proverb. It was impossible
with such antecedents to follow a sober student's

HFS PERSONAL CHARACTER. 543

career at Cambridge. Therefore he came to London,
engaged his talents in the service of the stage and
press, and plunged into Bohemian dissipations. No-
thing paints London at that period in more curious
colours than the description which Greene has given
us of his associates. Between respectable society and
the company of the most abandoned ruffians, this man
of letters found no middle term of intercourse. That
intermediate region, frequented by artists, playwrights,
pamphleteers, law-students, and men about town, which
we call Bohemia in modern capitals, did not then
apparently exist. To speak more strictly, it came into
existence a short while afterwards, when Shakspere
and Jonson, Beaumont and Chapman, gave tone to
literary clubs and taverns. Greene, through his own
fault, but also through the fault of a society which had
not yet developed its Bohemia, was thrown upon the
basest comradeship of knaves and sharpers, pimps and
strumpets. Ill adapted to respectable society^ he found
his only refuge and abiding-place in Alsatia.

In spite of the infamous life with which Greene
charges himself, he does not seem to have been a
thorough-going and contented scoundrel, but rather a
weak, vain, vicious man, who abandoned himself to
evil courses. He suffered occasional pangs of remorse,
and made one or two feeble efforts to amend his ways.
Once it was a sermon which stung his conscience to
the quick. At another time he married a respectable
woman, who bore him a child in wedlock. But his old
associates got hold of him. He deserted his wife,
squandered her money, and answered her unavailing
efforts to reclaim him with brutal insults. By the sister

544 SIIAKSPERE'S PREDKCKSSORS.

of one of his friends — a thief, called Cutting Ball, who
was afterwards hanged at Tyburn — he had a son, whom
he christened Fortunatus. His enemies in their satires
turned this name into Infortunatus, which was cer-
tainly more appropriate to the child of such parents.
Notwithstanding the intimate connections he thus
formed with the rogues of London, Greene exposed
the tricks of their trade in a series of pamphlets with
startling titles, as : * A Notable Discovery of Cozenage,'
* A Disputation between a He-Coneycatcher and a She-
Coneycatcher,' &c. ; proving himself vile enough to
turn informer for the sake of a profitable literary ven-
ture. We must, however, bear in mind that to coin
money by his pen was an absolute necessity. After
working out his vein in love pamphlets and Euphuistic
novels, he turned his experience in crime to account,
and lastly betook himself to autobiography. The
shamelessness of the man is a sufiicient guarantee for
the truth of his personal revelations. Vain, and de-
sirous of keeping his name before the public, but
without a character to lose, he made a cynical exposure
of his vices. These confessions, moreover, are stamped
with indubitable signs of earnestness. The accent of
remorse is too sincere and strongly marked in them to
justify a suspicion of deliberate fiction.

The last scene of Greene s miserable existence has
been often described. He lay, penniless, deserted by
his friends, consumed with the diseases of a libertine
and drunkard, on a bed for which he owed his landlord
money, without even the clothes which might have
enabled him to leave it. A surfeit of pickled herrings
and Rhenish wine is said to have been the final cause

GREENE'S DEATH. 545

of his death. As he lay there, alone and dying, the
thought of his injured wife and of his friends oppressed
his conscience. In the agony of repentance he addressed
a solemn warning to Peele, Nash, and Marlowe, calling
upon them with all the eloquence of death to repent of
their debaucheries and profanities. He prayed his
wife for forgiveness, and begged her to discharge his
debts : ' Doll, I charge thee, by the love of our youth
and by my souls rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ;
for if he and his wife had not succoured me, I had died
in the streets/ Two women visited the dying poet in
this extremity. One of them was the mother of his
illegitimate son, the sister of the felon Cutting Ball.
The other was his landlady. She cherished affection
and respect for the distinguished man of letters, and
tended him during a month's sickness. When he was
dead, she placed a wreath of bays upon his forehead,
and buried him at her own cost.

Greene deserves almost unmitigated reprobation.
He was not only profligate, but bad-hearted, and, as we
shall see, he indulged a rancorous animosity upon his
death-bed. Yet we may believe that had his youth es-
caped the contamination of Italian vices, had his abilities
been recognised by society, or had a place among men
of education and good manners been open to his
choice, he might perhaps have prospered. There are
points in his dramatic and lyric work which show that
circumstance, at least as much as natural frailty, made
Greene what he came to be ; and that, with a fair
share of the world's sunshine to bask in, he might have
passed for a jovial and irritable man of letters and of
pleasure. But at that epoch the trade of literature,

N N

546 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

especially in connection with the stage, was regarded
with contempt. Gabriel Harvey flung it in his face
that he made a living by his pen. He was almost
compelled to consort with the lowest populace.

Greene's career is typical. His friend Peele fared
hardly better, sinking into deep pecuniary distress, as
appears from a lamentable appeal to Lord Burleigh,
and dying of a dishonourable disease. Nash lived in
extreme poverty, repented publicly of his thriftless
and wretched existence, and died before his time.
Marlowe became a byword for profanity and atheism,
and was murdered in a tavern-brawl at Deptford
before reaching the age of thirty. Lodge alone,
after spending a troubled youth in many scenes of
varied action, retrieved his fortunes, joined the re-
spectable classes, and died decently of the plague at
the ripe age of sixty-seven. The four less fortunate
members of the group barely reckoned forty years
apiece when they passed out of life, exhausted by
what Anthony Wood contemptuously styles * that high
and loose course of living which poets generally
follow.' The pleasantest glimpse we get of them is
in a pamphlet by that genial friend of authors, Thomas
Dekker. In his * Knights Conjuring' he feigns to find
the friends together in a Grove of Bay-trees in Elysium.
* To this consort-room resort none but the children of
Phoebus, poets and musicians. When these happy
spirits sit asunder, their bodies are like to many stars ;
and when they join together in several troops, they
show like so many heavenly constellations.' Here, he
says, * Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, had got under the
shades of a large vine, laughing to see Nash, that was

GREENE'S WARNING TO PLAYWRIGHTS. 547

but newly come to their college, still haunted with the
sharp and satirical spirit that followed him here upon
earth.'

IV.

Greene's dying exhortation to his brother-play-
wrights is not only impressive by reason of its moral
earnestness, but also interesting for the light it casts
upon the theatre in that year, 1592. It opens thus:
* To those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance, that
spend their wits in making plays, R. G. wisheth a
better exercise, and wisdom to prevent his extremities.'
After calling upon Marlowe, 'famous gracer of tra-
gedians,' to abandon his blasphemies and atheistical
opinions, and upon Nash, * young Juvenal, that biting
satirist,' to abate the virulence and personality of his
attacks,^ he specially addresses Peele, * no less deserv-
ing than the other two, in some things rarer, in
nothing inferior.' Peele, he says, is unworthy better
hap, * sith thou dependest on so mean a stay.' That
stay was the theatre. Greene thus expounds his mean-
ing : * Base-minded men all three of you, if by my
misery ye be not warned ; for unto none of you, like
me, sought those burrs to cleave — those puppets, I
mean, that speak from our mouths, those antics
garnished in our colours.' These puppets are the
players, to whose neglect, rather than to his own vices,
he attributes his present destitution. Not long ago

* It has been doubted whether Greene meant Nash or Lodge by
* young Juvenal.' On the whole I feel sure that Nash is intended.
But it signifies comparatively little.

N N 2

548 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

they throve upon the bounty of Greene's pen, but
now they have deserted him, * for there is an upstart
crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his *' Tiger s
Heart wrapt in a Player's Hide," supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you ;
and being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his
own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.' In
other words, the playing companies can afford to do
without Greene because one of their own craft, Shak-
spere the actor, has begun to write dramas. Having
him at home and in their partnership, the actors leave
the scholar-poets to starve. Up to this point Greene
has not actually accused Shakspere of plagiarism, since
it appears from parallel passages in his works that the
* crow beautified with our feathers ' is only another
metaphor for a stage-player.^ This, however, he pro-
ceeds to do when he entreats his friends to ' employ
your rare wits in more profitable courses, and let these
apes imitate your past excellence, and never more
acquaint them with your admired inventions.' The
drift of the argument is this : * We, gentlemen and
scholars, have founded the Drama in England, and
have hitherto held a monopoly of the theatres. Those
puppets, antics, base grooms, buckram gentlemen,
peasants, painted monsters ' — for he calls the players by
all these names in succession — * have now learned not
only how to act our scenes, but how to imitate them ;
and there is one among them, Shakspere, who will drive
us all to penury.' Nothing can justify the violence of
this abuse or defend the assumption that the field of
dramatic composition was only open to graduates in

* See Simpson's School of Shaksjfere^ vol. ii. pp. 359, 368, 383.

SPITE AGAINST SHAKSPKRE, 549

arts. Nothing can excuse the spite of flinging Shak-
spere s country birth and lack of culture in his face
because his overwhelming greatness had become
apparent to his rivals. The contempt poured on the
actor s calling is also inexcusable ; for we have good
reason to believe that Greene himself, Marlowe, Peele,
Nash, and possibly Lodge also, had played their parts
upon the public stage. But the peculiar circumstances
of Greene's life as a playwright may be pleaded in some
extenuation of his virulence. He, first of all the group
of scholar-poets, quitted his university for London and
engaged in the Drama. Rhymed plays were then in
fashion, and these he produced with so much facility
and so excellent that he soon became the ' arch-play-
making poet.' At this point of his career Marlowe
revolutionised the stage with * Tamburlaine.' Greene
violently opposed the introduction of blank verse,
comparing its stately music to the ' fa-burden of Bow
bell,' and sneering at poets 'who set the end of
scholarism in an English blank verse.' He engaged
Nash in the same quarrel. In a preface to Greene's

* Menaphon ' the young satirist inveighed against

* idiot art-masters, that intrude themselves as the
alchemists of eloquence, and think to outbrave better
pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank
verse . . . the spacious volubility of a drumming deca-
syllabon.' This was in 1 589. Greene was defeated ;
and in order to maintain his position as a playwright,
he found himself compelled to adopt Marlowe's inno-
vations, and to imitate, so far as in him lay, the
mightier poet's style. Marlowe, we have every reason
to believe, was a man of kindly temperament, on whom

550 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

it was not easy to fix a literary quarrel.^ Therefore he
soon joined the society of scholar-playwrights, and was
accepted by Greene into his friendship. But no sooner
had the confraternity of * arch-playmaking poets/
'scholar-like shepherds/ been established upon this
new basis, than the star of Shakspere rose above the
horizon. It was obvious to the meanest capacity, in-
disputable by the grossest vanity, that Shakspere was
entering like a young prince into the dominions con-
quered by his predecessors, and that his reign would
be extended far beyond the limits of their empire.
Greene was an egotistical, irascible man, proud of his
academical honours and jealous of his literary fame in
London. Having bowed to Marlowe's superior genius,
he had now the mortification of beholding a greater
than Marlowe ; one, too, who was not even a scholar,
who had not travelled in Italy, who studied the subjects
of his plays in English versions, * feeding on nought
but the crumbs that fall from the translator s trencher.' *
Not only his fame but his daily bread was imperilled by
this intrusion into his territories. And what probably
made the matter worse, was that while Greene deplored
a misspent life in the service of the playgoing public,
he saw Shakspere winning golden opinions by the so-
briety of his conduct and amassing wealth by thrift and
business-like habits. No one could have written about
Greene what Chettle wrote in 1592 of Shakspere:'

' Soon after his tragic death, when everybody was abusing him, Nash
called him * poor deceased Kit Marlowe,' and Dyce quotes the epithet
•kind Kit Marlowe ' from a MS. poem published in 1600.

* See Nash's introduction to Greene's Mefiaphon for this phrase and
many others directed against the actor-playwright.

• See Dyce's Greene^ p. 61,

GREENE'S FAME. 551

' Myself have seen his demeanour no less civil
than he excellent in the quality he professes ; besides,
divers of worship have reported his uprightness of
dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious
grace in writing that approves his art/ To the Bohe-
mian scholar-poet, the professional dramatist, who
dignified his calling and pursued his trade with profit,
became an object of aversion. Greene's dying address
to his friends is thus a groan of disappointment and
despair ; a lamentation over wasted opportunities,
envenomed by envious hatred of a rival, wiser in his
deportment, more fortunate in his ascendant star.
Despicable as were the passions which inspired it, we
cannot withhold a degree of pity from the dying Titan,
discomfited, undone, and superseded, who beheld the
young Apollo issue in splendour and awake the world
to a new day.

The fame of Robert Greene during his lifetime
eclipsed that of his contemporaries. So greatly was
he esteemed that Gabriel Harvey, the remorseless
enemy who attacked him in the grave, exclaims in
anger : * Even Guiccardine's silver History and Ariosto's
golden Cantos grow out of request ; and the Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia is not green enough for queasy
stomachs ; but they must have Greene's " Arcadia," and,
I believe, most eagerly long for Greene s ** Faery
Queen." ' He was, in fact, the popular author of the day,
perused by gallants and Court ladies, and by waiting-
women who aped the manners of their mistresses. His
friends applauded the facility with which he turned his

552 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

talents to account. ' In a night and a day,' says Nash,
* would he have yarked up a pamphlet as well as in
seven years ; and glad was that printer that might be
so blest to pay him dear for the very dr^s of his wit'
This popularity was deservedly short-lived. Greene
did not write for immortality. His ephemeral pro-
ductions caught the taste of the moment, and brought
him quick returns of money and reputation. But the
fashion changed ; and ere long the very bulk of his
works in prose and verse, when compared with their
quality, became a reason for consigning them to
oblivion. As Anthony Wood remarks : 'He was
author of several things which were pleasing to men
and women of his time. They made much sport, and
were valued among scholars, but since they have
been mostly sold on ballad-mongers' stalls.'

Of all his miscellaneous productions, Greene's novels
had the greatest vogue. He was an avowed imitator
of Lyly, whom he followed in his choice of subjects,
treatment, and stylistic mannerism. When Harvey
called Greene * the ape of Euphues,' and Nash * the
ape of Greene,' Nash indignantly retorted : 'Did I
ever write of coney-catching, stuff my style with herbs
and stones, or apprentice myself to the running of the
letter?' He thus indirectly admits that his friend
abused alliteration, and adopted Lyly's absurd system
of metaphor. Yet Greene was by no means a mere
Euphuist. He employed the fashionable jargon in
speeches, epistles, and reflective digressions. But his
narrative is clear and flowing, and he has far more to
tell than Lyly. His own experience of life had been
varied and interesting. He knew how to reproduce it

HIS NOVELS, 553

with much liveliness in the delineation of characters,
the invention of incidents, and the analysis of passions,
strong and firmly outlined, if not remarkable for depth.
The autobiographical pamphlets, * Never Too Late,*
* Francesco's Fortunes/ * Greene's Groatsworth,' and
his * Repentance,' are powerfully written, with direct
simplicity of language. Even now they deserve atten-
tion, both for their revelation of the playwright's cha-
racter and for the light they throw upon the manners
of Bohemians in London. Nor must it be forgotten
that Shakspere founded the ' Winter's Tale ' on
Greene's ' Pandosto.'

Greene interspersed his novels with lyrics ; a cus-
tom derived from Sannazzaro, and illustrated by
Sidney. To these songs imperfect justice has, in my
opinion, hitherto been done. Though far from taking
high rank among the lyrics of the age — though in-
ferior to the similar compositions of Lodge and Barn-
field — they are distinguished by a certain sweetness, a
fluent vein of fancy, and a diction at once poetical and
easy to be understood. That they exerted no slight
influence over the work of succeeding song-writers,
will be evident from a few extracts. I will first select
' Philomela's Ode that she sung in her Arbour : '

Sitting by a river's side,
Where a silent stream did glide.
Muse I did of many things
That the mind in quiet brings.
I gan think how some men deem
Gold their god ; and some esteem
Honour is the chief content
That to man in life is lent ;
And some others do contend
Quiet none like to a friend ;

554 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Others hold there is no wealth
Compared to a perfect health ;
Some man's mind in quiet stands
When he is lord of many lands :
But I did sigh, and said all this
Was but a shade of perfect bliss ;
And in my thoughts I did approve
Nought so sweet as is true love.
Love twixt lovers passeth these,
When mouth kisseth and heart agrees,
With folded arms and lips meeting,
Each soul another sweetly greeting ;
For by the breath the soul fleeteth,
And soul with soul in kissing meeteth.
If love be so sweet a thing.
That such happy bliss doth bring,
Happy is love's sugared thrall ;
But, unhappy maidens all,
Who esteem your virgin blisses
Sweeter than a wife's sweet kisses !
No such quiet to the mind
As true love with kisses kind :
But if a kiss prove unchaste.
Then is true love quite disgraced.
Though love be sweet, learn this of me.
No love sweet but honesty.

A little group of these lyrics is devoted to the
loves of Venus and Adonis, which possessed so en-
thralling an attraction for the poets of that age — ^for
the young Shakspere — for Constable and Lodge and
Richard Bamfield. We may detect a foretaste of their
richer music in the following stanzas :

In Cyprus sat fair Venus by a fount,

Wanton Adonis toying on her knee :
She kissed the wag, her darling of account ;

The boy gan blush ; which when his lover see.
She smiled, and told him love might challenge debt.
And he was young, and might be wanton yet.

BIS LYRICS, 555

Reason replied that beauty was a bane

To such as feed their fancy with fond love,

That when sweet youth with lust is overta'en,
It rues in age : this could not Adon move,

For Venus taught him still this rest to set.

That he was young, and might be wanton yet

Infida's song, from * Never Too Late,' upon the
same theme, is slight, but very pretty :

Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye —

N*oserez-vous, mon bel ami ? —
Upon thy Venus that must die ?

Je vous en prie, pity me ;
N*oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel,
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami ?

See how sad thy Venus lies, —

N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami ? —
Love in heart, and tears in eyes ;

Je vous en prie, pity me ;
N'oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel,
N'oserez-vous, mon bel ami ?

Here again is a charming sketch of Love dressed
like a pilgrim :

Down the valley gan he track.
Bag and bottle at his back.
In a surcoat all of grey ;
Such wear palmers on the way.
When with scrip and staff they see
Jesus' grave on Calvary . . ,
Adon was not thought more fair :
CurlM locks of amber hair,
Locks where love did sit and twine
Nets to snare the gazers' eyne.
Such a palmer ne'er was seen,
'Less Love himself had palmer been.

The Shepherd's Wife's Song praises the pleasures
of a pastoral life in a series of graceful stanzas :

556 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Ah, what is love ? It is a pretty thing,
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king ;

And sweeter too :
For kings have cares that wait upon a crown,
And cares can make the sweetest love to frown :

Ah then, ah then.
If country loves such sweet desires do gain,
What lady would not love a shepherd swain ?

His flocks are folded, he comes home at night,
As merry as a king in his delight ;

And merrier too :
For kings bethink them what the state require,
Where shepherds carol careless by the fire :

Ah then, ah then.
If country loves such sweet desires gain.
What lady would not love a shepherd swain ?

The best of Greene's lyrical verses are in Se-
phestia's Song to her Child, from ' Menaphon : '

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee ;
When thou art old there 's grief enough for thee.

Mother's wag, pretty boy.

Father's sorrow, father's joy ;

When thy father first did see

Such a boy by him and me,

He was glad, I was woe ;

Fortune changed made him so.

When he left his pretty boy.

Last his sorrow, first his joy.

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee ;
When thou art old there 's grief enough for thee.

The wanton smiled, father wept.

Mother cried, baby leapt ;

More he crowed, more we cried,

Nature could not sorrow hide ;

He must go, he must kiss

Child and mother, baby bless.

For he left his pretty boy.

Father's sorrow, father's joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee ;
When thou art old there 's grief enough for thee.

ELIZABETHAN MUSIC, 557

It may be remarked that the earlier dramatists
commanded rhyme and lyrical measures more effec-
tively than prose or blank verse. In England lyrical
poetry was not at that epoch dissociated from music.
A sonnet ascribed to Shakspere compares Dowland
upon equal terms with Spenser. Dekker places the
poets and musicians together in Elysium : * the one
creates the ditty, and gives it the life and number ; the
other lends it voice, and makes it speak music' Every
house had its lute and virginal or spinet. Every
lover could salute his lady with a madrigal, or join in
part-songs at her table. The Puritans swept music
into the dusthole of oblivion, whence it has never
again emerged to gladden English ears with strains of
native art. But in the days of Elizabeth this change
was still far distant When therefore Greene and his
contemporaries wrote Canzonets and Sonnets, they
were using a well-tried and supple instrument When
they endeavoured to construct blank verse, or to build
harmonious periods in prose, they were creating new
forms, and could not at first exercise the unfamiliar art
with ease. This accounts for the superior smoothness
and metrical variety which may be noticed in the
songs of Greene.

VI.

In Greene s plays we can always trace the hand of
the novelist. He did not aim at unity of plot, or at
firm definition of character. Yet he manages to sus-
tain attention by his power of telling a story, inventing
an inexhaustible variety of motives, combining several
threads of interest with facility, and so arranging his

558 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

incongruous materials as to produce a pleasing general
effect. He has the merit of simplicity in details, and
avoids the pompous circumlocution in vogue among
contemporary authors. His main stylistic defect is
the employment of cheap Latin mythology in and out
of season. But his scenes abound in vivid incidents,
which divert criticism from the threadbare thinness
of the main conception, and offer opportunities to
clever actors. In spite of these good points, we feel
how crude and poor a thing the drama still remained.
Greene's plays, intermediate between comedy, tragedy,
and history, illustrate a step in the development of
the Romantic Drama, which had to be taken before
Shakspere set his own and final seal upon that form
of art. Stale devices of the Miracle and Morality
survive, indicating the poet's lack of power to or-
ganise the mechanism of a play. The Vice and
Devil still amuse the groundlings ; and the principal
personages introduce their parts, more antiquo, with
a blunt description of their qualities and claims to
notice. The best of Greene's work realises Cecchi's
description of the Farsa} The worst relapses into
the insipid buffoonery of the old English jig and
merriment

We possess none of Greene's earlier dramatic
compositions. Those which survive are posterior to
Marlowe's * Tamburlaine.' Greene uses blank verse,
but in his use of it betrays the manner of the couplet.
His * Orlando' is versified from Ariosto, and contains
a whole Italian stanza embedded in its English.
The * Looking-Glass for London ' dramatises the

' See above, p. 260.

GREENE'S PLAYS. 559

history of Jonah at Nineveh, so as to point a
moral for the capital of England. ' Alphonsus
Prince of Arragon' is a stage-show of processions,
battles, coronations, and the like, without dramatic
merit. ' James the Fourth of Scotland ' claims a
somewhat higher place. It partakes of the history
play and the novella, pretending to be borrowed
from Scotch annals, but relying for its interest
upon a romantic love-story. The induction might be
mentioned as an early instance of a very popular
theatrical device. In order to create more perfect
illusion, or to enliven the pauses between the acts
with dialogue, our elder dramatists represented the
real fruit of their invention as a play within a play,
feigning that the persons who first appeared upon the
stage fell asleep and saw the drama in a vision, or that
it was conjured up by magic art before them, or that
they chanced upon some strange adventure while wan-
dering in woody places. The ' Taming of a Shrew,'
before Shakspere touched it, was already furnished
with that humorous deception practised upon Sly,
which serves to introduce the comedy. Lyly begged
his audience to regard two of his pieces as dreams.
Peele caused the action of one of his rural medleys to
grow from a discussion between travellers belated in a
forest. Hey wood in his Masque of * Love's Mistress '
brings Midas and Apuleius on the stage, disputing
about poetry. The play occurs as matter for their
argument, and they canvass it at intervals between
the scenes. Jonson and Marston employed similar arti-
fices for blending criticism with the drama. Beaumont
introduced the ' Knight of the Burning Pestle' with a

S6o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

humorous dialogue between a citizen and his wife,
who insist upon their prentice taking part in the per-
formance. The introduction to Greene's ' James the
Fourth ' brings Oberon with his elves and a discon-
tented Scot upon the stage. The elves dance ; the
Scot produces the play in order to explain his discon-
tent. Oberon remains as a spectator, and makes
mirth during the intervals by dances of his fairies.
The drama illustrates the miseries of states, when
flatterers rule the Court, and kings yield to lawless
vice. In the portrait of the Lady Ida, for whose love
James deserts his wife and plots her murder, Greene
conceived and half expressed a true woman's character.
There is a simplicity, a perfume of purity, in Ida,
which proceeds from the poet's highest source of
inspiration. Nor do the romantic adventures and
pathetic trials of the queen fall far short of a melo-
dramatic success. That this man, dissolute and vicious
as he was, should have been the first of our playwrights
to feel and represent the charm of maiden modesty
upon the public stage, is not a little singular. Perhaps
it was, in part, to this that Greene owed his popularity.
Fawnia in ' Pandosto,' Margaret in ' Friar Bacon,'
Sephestia in ' Menaphon,' Ida and Dorothea in ' James
the Fourth,' Philomela and the Shepherd's Wife in
the * Mourning Garment,' belong to one sisterhood,
in whom the innocence of country life, unselfish love,
and maternity are sketched with delicate and feeling
touches.

' Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ' takes its name
from the famous Franciscan monk, and closely follows
an old English version of his legend in one portion of

* FRIAR BACON AND FRIAR BUNGA VJ 561

the plot. The conjuring tricks and incantations of the
Friar are cleverly interwoven with a romantic tale of
Edward Prince of Wales s love for Margaret, the fair
maid of Fresingfield ; the Earl of Lincoln's honest
treachery, who woos her for his lord and wins her for
himself ; and the history of her two suitors, Lambert
and Serlsby, who, together with their sons, are paren-
thetically killed upon the stage. A double comic
interest is sustained by Edward's Court fool Ralph,
and Miles the servant of Bacon. Written by a clever
story-teller, who, without a high ideal of art or deep
insight into character, could piece a tale together with
variety of incidents, this play is decidedly interesting.
The action never flags. Pretty scenes succeed each
other : now pastoral at Fresingfield, now grave at
Oxford, now terrible in Bacon's cell, now splendid at
the Court, now humorous with Miles, the friar's man.
A jocund freshness of blithe country air blows through
the piece, and its two threads of interest are properly
combined in the conclusion. Edward pardons the
Earl of Lincoln by giving him Margaret in marriage
on the same day that he weds Eleanor of Castile.
Friar Bacon foregoes his magic arts ; and Miles, who
is a lineal descendant of the Vice, dances off the stage
upon a merry devil's back, promising to play the
tapster in a certain thirsty place where * men are mar-
vellous dry.'

In his treatment of the magician, Greene differed
widely from his friend Marlowe. Marlowe idealised
the character of Faustus, using that legend for his inter-
pretation of the criminal passion for unlawful power.
Greene left Bacon as he found him in the popular

o o

562 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

romance — a necromancer, whose ambition is to circle
England with a brazen wall ; a conjuror with familiar
spirits at his beck, the maker of the brazen head, and
the possessor of a magic glass. H is chief exploits are
the discomfiture of various obnoxious personages, whom
he spirits through the air or strikes with dumbness,
and the service rendered to the Prince of Wales by
suspending Margaret's marriage rites at the distance of
many miles.

The language of the play, in spite of its essentially
English character, is curiously defaced with superficial
pedantry. The serious characters make use of classical
mythology on all occasions. Young Edward describes
the keeper's daughter of Fresingfield as * sweeping
like Venus through the house,' and ' shining among
her cream-bowls as Pallas niongst her princely house-
wifery.* Margaret herself is no less glib with allusions
to Semele and Paris and Qinone. But these flowers
of rhetoric are mere excrescences upon a style of silvery
simplicity. As a fair specimen of Greene's natural
manner, I will quote a description of Oxford, first seen
by King Henry and the Emperor riding over Magdalen
Bridge :

Trust me, Plantagenet, these Oxford schools
Are richly seated near the river side :
The mountains full of fat and fallow deer,
The battling pastures lade with kine and flocks,
The town gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learned in searching principles of art.

Writing in direct competition with Marlowe, and
striving to produce * strong lines,' Greene indulged in
extravagant imagery, which, because it lacks the ani-

GEORGE PEELE, 563

mating fire of Marlowe's rapture, degenerates into
mere bombast. The Prince of Wales is wooing the
keeper s daughter :

I tell thee, Pegg>', I will have thy loves :
Edward or none shall conquer Margaret
In frigates bottomed with rich Sethin planks,
Topt with the lofty firs of Lebanon,
Stemmed and incased with burnished ivory,
And over-laid with plates of Persian wealth,
Like Thetis thou shalt wanton on the waves,
And draw the dolphins to thy lovely eyes
To dance lavoltas in the purple streams :
Sirens, with harps and silver psalteries.
Shall wait with music at thy frigate's stem,
And entertain fair Margaret with their lays.

There is one good line here. * Sirens with harps and
silver psalteries,' is pretty ; and the whole passage
illustrates the rococo of the English Renaissance which
Marlowe made fashionable.^

VII.

Peele, though less prolific and many-sided than
Greene, early won and late retained the reputation of
a better poet. Nash, the friend of both, called him
primus verboriim artifex, and *an Atlas of poetry.*
Campbell observes : * We may justly cherish the
memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet
of our language. His ** David and Bethsabe" is the
earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be
traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and

^ See the description of Hero's buskins in Hero and Leattder^ and the
curious attire promised to the Shepherdess in * Come, live with me.'
Marlowe's imitators loved to indulge this vein, as might be illustrated
from Lusts Dominion,

0 0 2

564 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

his feeling tender ; and his conceptions of dramatic
character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid
veracity and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness
of versification and imagery to be found in our blank
verse anterior to Shakspere.' This judgment, consider-
ing that Marlowe preceded Shakspere, and formed the
style of his immediate contemporaries, cannot be sup-
ported. Gifford places Peele, together with Marlowe,
at the point in our dramatic history when ' the chaos
of ignorance was breaking up : they were among the
earliest to perceive the glimmering of sense and nature,
and struggled to reach the light/ Lamb dismisses the
Scriptural play so highly praised by Campbell in one
contemptuous word, calling it * stuff.' The truth is
that Peele exercised far less influence over the develop-
ment of our Drama than either Lyly or Greene, not to
mention Marlowe. The Court Comedies of Lyly and
the romantic medleys of Greene led by no uncertain
steps to Shakspere's comedies of the imagination.
Marlowe determined the metre and fixed the form of
tragedy. Peele discovered no new vein. It is in
elegant descriptions, in graceful and ingenious employ-
ment of mythology, in feeling for the charms of nature,
in tenderness of expression and sweetness of versifi-
cation, that we find his highest poetical qualities. These
he possessed in an eminent degree, considering the age
in which he lived. His best, but also his earliest,
work, the ' Arraignment of Paris,* is distinguished by
a certain sense of proportion, dignity of repose, and
harmonious distribution of parts, which prove that he
might have become a correct poet in that period of
bombast and exaggeration. But his necessities forced

* BA TTLE OF ALCAZAR: 565

him to follow the taste of the time ; and the CalipoHs
of one of his romantic tragedies passed with Cambyses
and Tamburlaine into a by-word for extravagance.

Three of Peele's plays may be dismissed with a bare
mention. In the 'Chronicle of Edward' he used a
ballad grossly libellous of Eleanor, the good queen.
As Eleanor was a Spaniard, it is not improbable that
Peele displayed her character in the worst light in
order to court popularity at a time when the prospect
of a Spanish marriage was odious to the English people.
At any rate, * Longshanks,' as the Chronicle was called,
became a favourite with the play-going public, and
kept the stage long after Peele and his associates had
been superseded by better playwrights. ' The Battle
of Alcazar,* like Greene's ' Alphonsus,' is a mere melo-
drama of * sound and fury, signifying nothing.' The
introduction of the popular hero, Thomas Stukeley.
gives it a certain interest. To the student of dramatic
evolution this play furnishes an excellent example of
the machinery employed by our oldest writers, in order
to make their scenes intelligible in the absence of proper
theatrical apparatus. A Presenter appeared before
each act and recited the argument, eking out his
explanatory remarks with a dumb show or symbolical
representation, so that the subject was analysed and
exhibited in brief, and the minds of the spectators were
prepared to follow the action with undisturbed atten-
tion. Fame, in the ' Battle of Alcazar,* enters the stage
at the end of the fourth act. Thunder and lightning,
comets and fireworks, herald her advent. The Pre-
senter, hereupon, declares that danger menaces the
kingdoms of Barbary, Morocco, and Portugal. Fame

566 SHAKSPKRK'S PREDECKSSOKS.

advances, and suspends three crowns upon the branches
of a tree. In the hurly-burly of the tempest these
are shaken down ; and as each falls, the Presenter
pronounces the name of the ruined throne. It will
be remembered that a Doctor or Expositor played
a prominent part in the Miracles ; the Presenter is a
survival of that antique functionary.^

Peele's * Old Wives' Tale ' deserv^es to be remem-
bered because of its resemblance to * Comus/ If
Milton borrowed the conception of his Masque from
this rustic comedy, he undoubtedly performed the pro-
verbial miracle of making a silk purse out of a sow s
ear. The mere outline of both pieces is the same.
Two brothers, seeking a lost sister in a wood by night,
find that she has fallen into the power of a sorcerer,
from whom she cannot be rescued until his magic
wreath has been torn off, his sword broken, and his
lamp extinguished. Moreover, the instrumentality of
a spirit is needed to accomplish her emancipation. So
far the coincidence with * Comus ' is manifest. But
Peele takes no advantage of these romantic circum-
stances, either to point a moral or to lift his subject
into the heavens of poetry. His heroine has actually
become besotted by the wizard. The wizard is a
common conjuror. The spirit is a vulgar village ghost
In nothing is the genius of a true poet more conspi-
cuous than in the intuition which enabled Milton to
perceive that such a dead thing might be pierced with

• Ciowcr, in Pericles^ presents the scenes and interprets the dumb
shows. In the Second Part oi Henry IV, Rumour is called the Presenter,
but only speaks a proloj^ue. In Henry V. a Chorus performs the Pre-
senters duty, but without dumb shows.

'OLD WIVES? tale: 567

* inbreathed life ' of art, philosophy, and allegory. So
far as the history of our Drama is concerned, the chief
interest of the * Old Wives' Tale ' lies in its setting.^
Three clowns lose their way in a wood, and come by
chance upon a poor smiths cottage. There is not
room for all of them to sleep in bed ; so the smith s
wife proposes to keep them waking with a merry tale.
She begins a rambling story about giants, conjurors,
and princesses, hopelessly confusing herself in the
labyrinth of her narrative, and suffering divers inter-
ruptions from her audience. Then the real actors —
the two brothers — enter, lamenting in blank verse their
sister s loss. The smith s wife hereupon suspends her
tale, and, with the clowns, hears out the piece and
comments on its incidents.

Peele s earliest essay in dramatic writing was * The
Arraignment of Paris,' a Classical Masque or Court
Comedy in honour of Elizabeth. Printed in 1584,
this ' first increase * of his wit, as Nash calls it, can
have owed nothing to Lyly. It shows no traces of
Lyly s style, and is moreover written, not in prose, but
in a variety of rhyming metres and blank verse. The
scene opens with an assembly of the rural gods in Ida.
Pan, Faun, and Sylvan have met * to bid Queen Juno
and her feres most humble welcome hither.' Pomona
joins them with a gift of fruit, and Flora scatters
flowers upon the meadow. When the three great
ladies of Olympus enter, these rustic deities, who play
the part of foresters and woodmen, invite them to the
simple pleasures of a y?/^^^^w//^/r^. Then the scene

' See above, p. 559.

568 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

changes to a grove, where Paris and Qinone are dis-
coursing of their loves. He pipes, and she sings that
well-known roundelay, which has for its refrain the
curse of Cupid :

They that do change old loves for new,
Pray gods they change for worse.

In the second act, Ate's golden ball, inscribed with the
fatal words Detur pulcfierrinuBy is discovered by the
goddesses, who refer their claims to Paris. Each
speaks in turn, offering the shepherd gifts to sway his
judgment. Juno says :

Shepherd !

I will reward thee with great monarchies.
Empires and kingdoms, heaps of massy gold,
Sceptres and diadems.

Pallas disdains these trivial bribes :

Me list not tempt thee with decaying wealth . . .
But if thou have a mind to fly above,
If thou aspire to wisdom's worthiness.
If thou desire honour of chivalry,
To fight it out, and in the champaign field
To shroud thee under Pallas* warlike shield,
To prance on barbed steeds ; this honour, lo,
Myself for guerdon shall on thee bestow.

Venus speaks of love after the wanton fashion of the
sixteenth century, and reveals a stationary figure ol
Helen attired ' in all her bravery/ Helen sings an
Italian sonnet, while attendant Cupids *fan fresh air in
her face/ Paris decides that if beauty is to have the
ball, it must belong to Venus. With this verdict the
rival goddesses are dissatisfied, and the shepherd is
arraigned before the high court of Olympus. Mercury,

'akka/ca\u/':nt of par/s: 569

sent down to summon Paris, finds him conversing with
Venus, who describes the punishment of infidelity :

In hell there is a tree,
Where once a day do sleep the souls of false forsworen lovers,
With open hearts ; and thereabout in swarms the number hovers
Of poor forsaken ghosts whose wings from off this tree do beat
Round drops of fiery Phlegethon to scorch false hearts with heat.

Paris is now conducted to the council of the gods,
before whom he stands and pleads :

A mortal man amid this heavenly presence.

He denies the charge of partiality and corruption,
arguing that the apple was due to pre-eminent beauty.
His speech is eloquent and powerful. The gods ad-
mire his manliness, applaud his verdict, and send him
back to earth. But Juno and Pallas being still un-
satisfied, Venus lays her prize before the male gods,
and leaves them to adjudicate. Jupiter, between the
claims of justice and his fear of Juno, is perplexed.
Vulcan s jealousy prevents him from supporting Venus.
Saturn takes no interest in so insignificant a contest.
At length Apollo rises, declares that women must be
judged by women, and refers the suit to Diana. This
leads to the catastrophe. In the last act Diana de-
livers her sentence to the satisfaction of all. She
describes England and Elizabeth in glowing language,
hyperbolical and tender, such as the old poets used
when treating of so dear a theme. The Fates, she
says, intend that day to shower upon the maiden
monarch all their choicest gifts. Let the goddesses
go too, and lay the apple at Elizas feet. This they

570 SHAKSPER/ys PREDFCESSORS.

do with cheerful acquiescence, and the play ends with
an epilogue sung by all the actors :

Vive diu felix votis hominumque deumque,
Corpore mente libro doctissima Candida casta.

This solution of the plot, though extravagantly flatter-
ing, is both ingenious and felicitous ; and the whole
play deserves high praise for its artistic construction.

• David and Bethsabe,' regarded by some of Peele s
critics as his masterpiece, presents us with a curious
specimen of the Miracle Play in its most modem form.
Joab, Abishai, and Jonadab discourse in the euphuistic
language of the period ; but when we reflect that they
probably wore trunk-hose and ruffs, the inconsistency^
does not appear so glaring. Peele endeavoured to
invest his imagery with Oriental splendour ; nor has
he altogether failed. David's passion is expressed in
glowing hyperboles. Metaphors borrowed from the
Song of Solomon recur throughout the piece ; and when
we read of the

Kingly bower.
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams,

through which the mistress of the king comes * tripping
like a roe,' bringing his * longings tangled in her hair,*
we feel that some measure of inspiration was granted to
the poet. There is imagination, though of a turbid and
plethoric species, in the following apostrophe to Tamar
on her shameful love :

Fair Thamar, now dishonour hunts thy foot,
And follows thee through every covert shade,
Discovering thy shame and nakedness,
Even from the valley of Jehosophat
Up to the lofty mounts of Lebanon ;

'DAVID AND nKTHSAI^K: 571

Where cedars, stirred with anger of the winds,

Sounding in storms the tale of thy disgrace,

Tremble with fury, and with murmur shake

Earth with their feet and with their heads the heavens,

Beating the clouds into their swiftest rack,

To bear this wonder round about the world.

That is Cambyses* vein applied to what Mr. Ruskin
calls the * pathetic fallacy * — the greatest powers of
nature in commotion, storms rushing through the
length of Palestine, immemorial cedars shaken on their
everlasting hills, the depths below and heights above,
all agitated by the story of a woman's shame.

It is doubtful whether a dull rhyming play en-
titled * Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes * be Peele's.
Anyhow, it does not call for comment. I prefer to
quote some lines from the warlike ode addressed to
Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake upon the eve
of their disastrous expedition to Portugal. Written
when the defeat of the Armada was yet fresh, it glows
with the awakened spirit of the English nation, and
sounds a clarion note of what would now be called
Elizabethan Jingoism :

Bid theatres and proud tragedians.
Bid Mahomet, Scipio,* and mighty Tamburlane,
King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest.
Adieu. To arms, to arms, to glorious arms !
With noble Norris, and victorious Drake,
Under the sanguine cross brave England's badge
To propagate religious piety.
And hew a passage with your conquering swords
By land and sea, wherever Phoebus' eye,
Th* eternal lamp of heaven, lends us light;

' Is this rightly corrected ? Or should we adopt Hoo or Howe} The
old copies give /W, I believe.

572 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

By golden Tagus, or the western Inde,

Or through the spacious bay of Portugal,

The wealthy ocean-main, the Tyrrhene sea.

From great Alcides' pillars branching forth

Even to the gulf that leads to lofty Rome ;

There to deface the pride of Antichrist,

And pull his paper walls and popery down, —

A famous enterprise for England's strength.

To steel your swords on avarice's triple crown,

And cleanse Augeas' stalls in Italy.

To arms 1 my fellow soldiers 1 Sea and land

Lie open to the voyage you intend ;

And sea or land, bold Britons, far or near.

Whatever course your matchless virtue shapes,

Whether to Europe's bounds or Asian plains,

To Afric's shore, or rich America,

Down to the shades of deep Avemus* crags.

Sail on, pursue your honours to your graves :

Heaven is a sacred covering for your heads.

And every climate virtue's tabernacle.

To arms, to arms, to honourable arms !

Hoise sails, weigh anchors up, plough up the seas

With flying keels, plough up the land with swords :

In God's name venture on ; and let me say

To you, my mates, as Caesar said to his.

Striving with Neptune's hills ; * you bear,' quoth he,

* Caesar and Caesar's fortune in your ships.'

You follow them whose swords successful are ;

You follow Drake, by sea the scourge of Spain,

The dreadful dragon, terror to your foes.

Victorious in his return from Inde,

In all his high attempts unvanquishM ;

You follow noble Norris, whose renown

Won in the fertile fields of Belgia,

Spread by the gates of Europe to the courts

Of Christian kings and heathen potentates;

You fight for Christ and England's peerless Queen

Elizabeth, the wonder of the world,

Over whose throne the enemies of God

Have thundered erst their vain successless braves.

O, ten-times-treble happy men that fight

Under the cross of Christ, and England's Queen,

And follow such as Drake and Norris are !

Patriotic poems, 573

The same spirit animates Peele s poem on the Order
of the Garter. The first knights or Founders of the
Garter are thus enumerated '}

Edward, Prince of Wales,
Was first ; then Henry, Duke of Lancaster ;
And Nicholas, Earl of Warwick, made the third;
Captain de Buch was next, renowned for arms ;
Then the brave E^rls of Stafford and Southampton,
And Mortimer, a gentle, trusty lord ;
Then Lisle, and Burghersh, Beauchamp, and Mohun,
Grey, Courtenay, and the Hollands, worthy knights,
Fitz-Simon, Wale, and Sir Hugh Wrottesley,
Nele Loring, Chandos, Sir Miles Stapleton,
Walter Pagannel, Eam, and D'Audley ; last
Was the good knight Sir Sanchet D'Abrichecourt.

VIII.

Thomas Nash claims a place of no little importance
in the history of English prose. His pamphlets,
modelled upon those in vogue among Italian writers of
the school of Aretine, display a trenchant wit and a
directness in the use of language, which were rare in
that age. He was a bom satirist, hitting hard, abstain-
ing from rhetorical parades of erudition, sketching a
caricature with firm and broad touches, and coining
pithy epigrams which stung like poisoned arrows. No
writer before Nash, and few since his death, have
used the English language as an instrument of pure
invective with more complete mastery and originality
of manner. Returning from an Italian journey in the
summer of 1588, Nash joined Greenes circle, and

^ Piety to these knights of the French wars, among whom I count a
collateral ancestor. Sir Richard Fitz-Simon, rather than admiration for
the poetry of this passage, makes me print these lines.

574 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

began to employ his pen at the dictation of the
Bishops Whitgift and Bancroft in the Martin Mar-
prelate dispute. It was his chief literary exploit to
bring the matter of ecclesiastical debate from the
pulpit down into the market-place, and to disarm a
cumbrous antagonist by ridicule and scurrilous abuse
instead of argument and dissertation. Thus much in
the art of controversy Nash had learned from the
Italian humanists and their successors, the Venetian
pamphleteers. But these foreign weapons he used
with the coarse vigour and grotesque humour of an
Englishman. His lampoons attracted immediate at-
tention. Their style was imitated but not equalled
by Lodge, Lyly, and others. Nash acquired a sudden
and a lasting reputation as the first and most for-
midable satirist of his epoch. His name is always
coupled with some epithet like * gallant Juvenal,' the
* English Aretine,' and * railing ' Nash. The friend-
ship he formed with Greene was close, and lasted
to the end of that unhappy poets life. Nash, it is
said, assisted at the supper which resulted in Greene's
fatal illness. After his comrade s death he was drawn
into a famous word-conflict with Gabriel Harvey, the
Cambridge pedant and friend of Spenser, who currishly
vented his spleen against the dead man in a clumsy
satire. Nash took the cudgels up, and overwhelmed
Harvey with such abuse as he alone could hurl at an
antagonist, pouring forth pamphlet after pamphlet of
the bitterest sarcasm and most voluble denunciation.
Harvey responded, as well as his more lumbering wits
were able ; till at last the See of Canterbury intervened
with an order that the tracts hitherto published by

NASH'S PAMPHLETS. 575

both champions should be taken up and destroyed,
and that no printer should regale the public with any
further libels from their scandalous pens. Enough
attention has been called on various occasions and by
several critics to these obsolete literary conflicts. In a
survey of the Elizabethan stage, it is not needful to
revert to them, except with the purpose of characteris-
ing an author, who, while he was the first pamphleteer,
took rank as one of the least eminent among the many
playwrights of his age. Yet one word may still be
added upon a prose tract, rather autobiographical than
controversial, in which Nash has bequeathed to us some
interesting sketches of contemporary London manners.
* Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil,' was
clearly written to relieve its author s necessities. The
introduction sets forth in grave and heartfelt terms the
discouragement of a scholar driven to desperate shifts
and seduced to evil courses by the neglect of patrons
and the difficulty of making a livelihood out of litera-
ture. It confirms the truth of Greene s dying appeal
to his Bohemian companions, and illustrates the miser-
able position of those academical writers, cast adrift in
London without a fixed employment or a recognised
profession, who were doomed, less by their own fault
than by the adverse circumstances of the literary life
as they pursued it, to failure, indigence, and early
death. The London of Elizabeth had in fact its Grub
Street no less than the London of Queen Anne. " Pierce
Penniless ' is further valuable for the series of animated
portraits it contains, studied from the life and repre-
senting types of character about town. To these and
to the incidental defence of stage-plays, which Nash

576 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

found occasion to introduce, I shall return at the proper
opportunity.

Nash's fame as a dramatist rests upon three plays.
The first of these, and probably the most characteristic
of his genius, was never printed. It bore the title of
the * Isle of Dogs,* was possibly, but not certainly, a
political satire, and cost its author an imprisonment in
gaol. This punishment brought him, however, rather
reputation than disgrace. Meres, in his * Palladia
Tamia,' alludes kindly to the incident : * Dogs were
the death of Euripides ; but be not disconsolate, gallant
young Juvenal ; Linus, the son of Apollo, died the same
death. Yet God forbid that so brave a wit should so
basely perish ! Thine are but paper dogs ; neither is
thy banishment, like Ovid s, eternally to converse with
the barbarous Getes.* When Nash came out of prison,
he took credit to himself for the past consequences of
his caustic speech ; whence we may infer that, if not
political, the satire of his * Isle of Dogs ' concerned
some persons of importance, to libel whom was not less
honourable than perilous.

Nash had some share, but what share it is im-
possible to settle, in a dramatic adaptation of the
Fourth -^neid, which appeared in 1594 under Mar-
lowe s name. It is possible that the MS. was left
unfinished, and that Nash, a friend of Marlowe, did no
more than to edit and prepare it for the stage. All
that is original and striking in this tragedy, especially
the opening scene in Olympus, and the part assigned
to Cupid, may with certainty be ascribed to Marlowe.
There remains, perhaps, a sufficiency of plain pedes-
trian blank verse, to establish the inferior poet's title to

NASH AS DRAMATIST. 577

collaboration. But after careful study of * Queen Dido,'
I am inclined to think that Nash's share in it was
small, and that the play was one of Marlowe's earlier
essays, thrust aside for some uncertain reason, and
brought forth when death had added lustre to his
name. It abounds in rhyming lines and assonances,
which points to an early date of composition ; but its
style is distinguished throughout by traces of Marlowe's
peculiar manner.

Of what dramatic work, in conception and in
versification, Nash himself was capable, is apparent
from his sole surviving piece, * Will Summer's Testa-
ment.* This is a Court Comedy, or Show, without a
plot, depending for its now evaporated interest on
learned quips and fashionable cranks served up with
masquerade and satire for the Queens amusement It
represents a bygone phase of taste, before the world
had learned to read, when word-of-mouth tirades on
things in general had their savour. The motive is
a play of words maintained upon the name of Summer.
Will Summer, the Court fool of Henry VIII., whose
portrait by Holbein still exists at Kensington, speaks
prologue, and conducts the piece. He or his ghost
appears in clown's costume, and nodding to the audience,
opens with : * I'll show you what a scurvy prologue
our play-maker has made in an old vein of similitudes.*
Summer then pulls forth and reads a pompous parody
of Euphuism in a long preposterously laboured dia-
tribe of nonsense. This, when he has played with it
for a few paragraphs, the fool tosses carelessly aside,
and speaks in his own person to the audience. * How
say you, my masters ? Do you not laugh at him for

p p

578 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

a coxcomb ? Why, he hath made a prologue longer
than his play ! Nay, 'tis no play neither, but a show/
After this box-on-the-ears to Lyly, Summer, the
Season, enters, holds his Court, reviews the revolu-
tions of the year, and makes his will, reserving all the
honours of the prime to Queen Elizabeth :

Unto Eliza, that most sacred dame,

Whom none but saints and angels ought to name.

While the Seasons in their masquing dresses pass across
the stage and furnish forth appropriate entertainment,
Summer, the Court fool, sits by and comments. To
modern readers the fun of the show, if fun it ever had,
is withered and gone by — more withered than the
roses, and more wasted than the snows of yester-year.
' Ingenious, fluent, facetious Thomas Nash,' wrote
genial Dekker ; ' from what abundant pen flowed honey
to thy friends, and mortal aconite to thy enemies ! '
Alas, poor Tom Nash ! Little enough is left of thee,
thy humour and thy satire ! The men of our days
cannot taste thy honey, and thy aconite has lost its
venom. Dust too are the pedants and the puritans
on whom it was so freely spilt. Yet something still
survives from this dry caput vtorttcum of an ephemeral
medley. The first lyric printed in the * Golden Trea-
sury,' that gift-book to all children of our time and
vade'7necu7n of all lovers of old literature, is a spring
song from * Will Summer s Testament.* Nor is there
wanting in its scenes a second ditty, of less general
application, but sweeter still and sadder, in which the
dying Summer proves that our * young gallant Juvenal *

LODGE AS DRAMATIST. 579

was a real poet. Let one of its stanzas serve to vin-
dicate this claim, and satisfy his disappointed ghost :

Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour :
Brightness falls from the air ;
Queens have died young and fair :
Dust hath closed Helenas eye :
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us !

IX.

One more dramatist of Greene's brood must be
mentioned. Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayors son,
master of arts, law student, perhaps actor, buccaneer,
physician, poet of Scylla and of Rosalynde, satirist of
manners, defender of the stage, exposer of money-
lenders and their myrmidons — this man of multifarious
ability and chequered experience, was also a play-
wright. In proportion to his other works, the plays
of Lodge are insignificant. He aided his friend
Greene in * The Looking Glass for London,' and
quarried a tragedy from Plutarch on the rivalries of
Marius and Sylla. ' The Wounds of Civil War ' is
disappointing in execution — especially in the versifica-
tion, which shows no effort to profit by Marlowe's
invention, and in the comic parts, which fall below the
usual level of such stuff. Lodge may indeed be
credited with an honest effort to trace firm outlines
of his principal male characters. Yet his reputation
as an English poet will not rest upon this lifeless

PP2

58o SHAKSPEREiS PREDECESSORS.

play, but on the charming lyrics which are scattered
through his novels.

It is time to leave the little coterie of friends who
clustered around Greene in London, and to concen-
trate attention upon Marlowe, himself a member of
their society, but far superior in all qualities which
make a dramatist and poet In the prose romances of
this group, the influence of Lyly's style is still dis-
cernible. But Greene marks a new departure in
dramatic literature. The romantic play, the English
Farsa, may be called in a great measure his discover)^
Nash marks a no less noticeable departure in the
prose of controversy and satire. Peele is a sweet
versifier and an artist gifted with a sense of proportion
unusual in his age. Lodge distinguishes himself as a
rarely musical and natural lyrist. Marlowe, intervening
at the height of Greene s popularity, imposed his style
in a measure on these contemporaries. But none of
them were able effectively to profit by the contact of
this fiery spirit. He took the town by storm ; they
adopted some of his inventions, without understanding
their importance and without assimilating the more
potent influences of his art

^ Lodge has found so genial and able an expositor in Mr. Gosse, that
I have purposely curtailed the above notice of his interesting career and
distinguished literary work. See the first essay in that charming collection,
Seventeenth Century Studies^ by G. W. Gosse.

58i

CHAPTER XV.

MARLOWE.

I. The Life of Marlowe — Catalogue of his Works. — II. The Father of
English Dramatic Poetry — He Fixes the Romantic Type — Adopts
the Popular Dramatic Form, the Blank Verse Metre of the Scholars
— He Transfigures both Form and Metre — His Consciousness of his
Vocation. — III. The History of Blank Verse in England— Italian
Precedent — Marlowe's Predecessors — Modem and Classical Metrical
Systems — Quantity and Accent — The Licentiate Iambic — Gascoigne's
Critique — Marlowe's Innovations in Blank Verse— Pause— Emphasis
— Rhetoric a Key to good Blank Verse — The Variety of Marlowe's
Metre. — IV. His Transfiguration of Tragedy — The Immediate EflTect
of his Improvements — He marks an Epoch in the Drama. — V. Co-
lossal Scale of Marlowe's Works — Dramatisation of Ideals — Defect
of Humour — No Female Characters. —VI. Marlowe's Leading
Motive — The Impossible Amour — The Love of the Impossible por-
trayed in the Guise — In Tamburlaine — In Faustus — In Mortimer —
Impossible Beauty — What would Marlowe have made of *Tann-
haiiser'?— Barabas— The Apotheosis of Avarice. — VII. The Poet
and Dramatist inseparable in Marlowe — Character of Tamburlaine.
— VIII. The German Faustiad — Its N6rthem Character — Psycho-
logical Analysis in * Doctor Faustus' — The Teutonic Sceptic — For-
bidden Knowledge and Power — Grim Justice — Faustus and Mephis-
tophilis — The Last Hour of Faustus — Autobiographical Elements in
< Doctor Faustus.'— IX. *The Jew of Malta ' — Shylock — Spanish
Source of the Story — An Episode of Spanish Humour — Acting Quali-
ties of Marlowe's Plays. — X. * Edward II.' — Shakspere and Marlowe
in the Chronicle-Play — Variety of Characters — Dialogue — The Open-
ing of this Play — Gaveston — Edward's Last Hours. — XI. *The
Massacre at Paris ' — Its Unfinished or Mangled Text — Tragedy of
*Dido' — Hyperbolical Ornament — Romantic and Classic Art. — XII.
Marlowe greater as a Poet than a Dramatist — His Reputation with
Contemporaries.

Of the life of Christopher Marlowe very little is known.
He was a shoemaker's son, born at Canterbury in 1564,

s82 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

— two months earlier than Shakspere at Stratford —
and was educated at the Kings School in that town.
He entered Benet College, Cambridge, as a Pensioner,
in 1 581, and after taking his B.A. degree came up to
seek his fortune in London, * a boy in years, a man in
genius, a god in ambition,' as Swinburne no less truly
than finely writes of the young Titan of the stage. It
is more than probable that Marlowe, under the in-
fluence perhaps of Francis Kett, who was a Fellow of
Benet College in 1573, and was burned at Norwich in
1589 for anti-Christian heresy, had already contracted
opinions which closed a clerical career against him,
and which rendered any of the recognised professions
distasteful. Be this as it may, he was indubitably bom
a poet, and nothing but the exercise of his already full-
grown genius could have satisfied his nature. The
most remarkable point to notice about Marlowe is that
he served no apprenticeship to art, and went to school
with none of the acknowledged masters of his age.
His first extant tragedy shows him in possession of a
new style, peculiar to himself, representative of his own
temperament, and destined by its force, attractiveness,
and truth to revolutionise the practice of all elder play-
wrights and contemporaries. The demand for plajrs
in public theatres was sufficient at this epoch to make
dramatic authorship fairly profitable. The society of
the green-room and the stage, in revolt against con-
ventions and tolerant of eccentricities in conduct and
opinion, suited the wild and ardent spirit of a man who
thirsted lawlessly for pleasure and forbidden things.
Marlowe does not seem to have hesitated in his choice
of life, but threw his lot in frankly with the libertines

ATA R LOWE'S LIFE. 583

and reprobates, whose art he raised from insignificance
to power and beauty. No sooner had his imagination
given birth to the first part of * Tamburlaine ' than he
became the idol of the town.^

Marlowe took his Masters degree in -1587, and
before this date ' Tamburlaine ' had been performed.
The rest of his short life was spent in writing tragedies
for money. What he gained by his pen he is said to
have squandered among the frequenters of suburban
taverns. Puritans, who did their best to stigmatise the
morals of the stage, described him as a blasphemer and
notorious evil-liver. We cannot feel sure that their
portrait of the man was substantially correct ; though
Greene's address to Marlowe on his death-bed makes it
appear that, even among his intimate friends, he had
gained a reputation for insolent atheism. His end was
tragic : a rival in some love adventure stabbed him with
his own dagger in a tavern at Deptford. This was in
1593, before the completion of his thirtieth year. If we
assign the first part of ' Tamburlaine ' to 1587, this gives
a period of some six years to Marlowe's activity as an
author. Within that brief space of time he successively
produced the second part of 'Tamburlaine,' 'Dr.
Faustus,' ' The Massacre at Paris,' * The Jew of Malta,'
and ' Edward 1 1.' These tragedies were performed dur-
ing their author's lifetime ; and though it is impossible to
fix their order with any certainty, internal evidence of

^ If we could trust the genuineness of an old ballad, The Atheist^s
Tragedy^ published by Dyce at the end of his edition of Marlowe's works,
we should believe that Marlowe began his theatrical career as an actor at
the Curtain, where he broke his leg. But the ballad in question, printed
from a MS. in the possession of the late Mr. J. P. Collier, has to be
classified with other dubious materials furnished by that ingenious student,
on which a cautious critic will prefer to found no theories.

584 SHAk'SPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Style justifies us in assigning the two last-named plays
to the later years of his life, while the two ' Tambur-
laines ' are undoubtedly among the earliest fruits of his
genius. At his death he left an unfinished drama on
the tragedy of ' Dido/ which I am inclined to refer to
the beginning of his career as playwright It show^s a
still imperfect command of blank verse and a hesitation
between that measure and rhyme, which does not
belong to the poets maturity. In addition to these
dramatic works Marlowe bequeathed to the world the
fragment of a narrative poem, which stands higher in
poetic quality, both of conception and execution, than
any similar work of the Elizabethan age, not excepting
Shakspere s ' Venus and Adonis.' I mean, of course,
the ' Hero and Leander/ The translation into blank
verse of the first book of Lucan s * Pharsalia * may pass
for an exercise in Marlowe's own * licentiate iambic '
metre. The rhymed translation of Ovid's ' Amores,'
which an Archbishop of Canterbury and a Bishop of
London thought worthy of public burning, may also be
regarded as an exercise prelusive to that liberal use of
the couplet in * Hero and Leander,' whereby Marlowe
stamped rhyming heroic verse with his own seal no less
emphatically than he had stamped unrhymed heroic
verse in ' Tamburlaine.' A few minor pieces, including
the beautiful and well-known pastoral, ' Come live with
me and be my love,' complete the tale of the young
poet's contributions to our literature.

THE FOUNDER OF ENGLISH DRAMA, 585

II.

Marlowe has been styled, and not unjustly styled,
the father of English dramatic poetry. When we
reflect on the conditions of the stage before he pro-
duced * Tamburlaine,' and consider the state in which
he left it after the appearance of 'Edward 11./ we
shall be able to estimate his true right to this title. Art,
like Nature, does not move by sudden leaps and bounds.
It required a slow elaboration of divers elements, the
formation of a public able to take interest in dramatic
exhibitions, the determination of the national taste
toward the romantic rather than the classic type of
art, and all the other circumstances which have been
dwelt upon in the preceding studies, to render Mar-
lowe s advent as decisive as it proved. Before he
began to write, various dramatic species had been
essayed with more or less success. Comedies modelled
in form upon the types of Plautus and Terence;
tragedies conceived in the spirit of Seneca ; chronicles
rudely arranged in scenes for representation ; drama-
tised novels and tales of private life ; Court comedies
of compliment and allegory ; had succeeded to the
religious Miracles and ethical Moralities. There was
plenty of productive energy, plenty of enthusiasm and
activity. Theatres continued to spring up, and
acting came to rank among the recognised profes-
sions. But this activity was still chaotic. None could
say where or whether the germ of a great national
art existed. To us, students of the past, it is indeed
cl ear enough in what direction lay the real life of the

586 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

drama ; but this was not apparent to contemporaries.
Scholars despised the shows of mingled bloodshed
and buffoonery' in which the populace delighted. The
people had no taste for dry and formal disquisitions
in the style of * Gorboduc' The blank verse of
Sackville and Hughes rang hollow; the prose of
Lyly was affected ; the rhyming couplets of the
popular theatre interfered with dialogue and free
development of character. The public itself was
divided in its tastes and instincts ; the mob inclining to
mere drolleries and merriments upon the stage, the
better vulgar to formalities and studied imitations. A
powerful body of sober citizens, by no means wholly
composed of Puritans and ascetics, regarded all forms
of dramatic art with undisguised hostility. Meanwhile,
no really great poet had arisen to stamp the tendencies
of either Court or town with the authentic seal of
genius. There seemed a danger lest the fortunes of
the stage in England should be lost between the pre-
judices of a literary class, the puerile and lifeless
pastimes of the multitude, and the disfavour of con-
servative moralists. From this peril Marlowe saved
the English drama. Amid the chaos of conflicting
elements he discerned the true and living germ of art,
and set its growth beyond all risks of accident by his
achievement.

When, therefore, we style Marlowe the father and
founder of English dramatic poetry, we mean that he
perceived the capacities for noble art inherent in the
Romantic Drama, and proved its adaptation to high
purpose by his practice. Out of confusion he brought

CLASSIC METRE AND ROMANTIC MATTER, 587

order, following the clue of his own genius through a
labyrinth of dim unmastered possibilities. Like all
great craftsmen, he worked by selection and exclusion
on the whole mass of material ready to his hand ; and
his instinct in this double process is the proof of his
originality. He adopted the romantic drama in lieu of
the classic, the popular instead of the literary type.
But he saw that the right formal vehicle, blank verse,
had been suggested by the school which he rejected.
Rhyme, the earlier metre of the romantic drama, had
to be abandoned. Blank verse, the metre of the
pedants, had to be accepted. To employ blank verse
in the romantic drama was the first step in his revolu-
tion. But this was only the first step. Both form
and matter had alike to be transfigured. And it was
precisely in this transfiguration of the right dramatic
metre, in this transfiguration of the right dramatic
stuff, that Marlowe showed himself a creative poet.
What we call the English, or the Elizabethan, or
better perhaps the Shaksperian Drama, came into
existence by this double process. Marlowe found the
public stage abandoned to aimless trivialities, but
abounding in the rich life of the nation, and with the
sympathies of the people firmly enlisted on the side of
its romantic presentation. He introduced a new class
of heroic subjects, eminently fitted for dramatic hand-
ling. He moulded characters, and formed a vigorous
conception of the parts they had to play. Under his
touch the dialogue moved with spirit ; men and women
spoke and acted with the energy and spontaneity of
nature. He found the blank verse of the literary

588 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

school monotonous, tame, nerveless, without life or
movement But he had the tact to understand its
vast capacities, so vastly wider than its makers had
divined, so immeasurably more elastic than the rhymes
for which he substituted its sonorous cadence. Mar-
lowe, first of Englishmen, perceived how noble was
the instrument he handled, how well adapted to the
closest reasoning, the sharpest epigram, the loftiest
flight of poetry, the subtlest music, and the most
luxuriant debauch of fancy. Touched by his hands
the thing became an organ capable of rolling thunders
and of whispering sighs, of moving with pompous
volubility or gliding like a silvery stream, of blowing
trumpet-blasts to battle or sounding the soft secrets
of a lover's heart. I do not assert that Marlowe made
it discourse music of so many moods. But what he
did with it, unlocked the secrets of the verse, and
taught successors how to play upon its hundred stops.
He found it what Greene calls a ' drumming deca-
syllabon.' Each line stood alone, formed after the same
model, ending with a strongly accented monosyllable.
Marlowe varied the pauses in its rhythm; combined
the structure of succeeding verses into periods ; altered
the incidence of accent in many divers forms and left the
metre fit to be the vehicle of Shakspere s or of Milton's
thought. Compared with either of those greatest
poets, Marlowe, as a versifier, lacks indeed variety of
cadence, and palls our sense of melody by emphatic
magniloquence. The pomp of his ' mighty line ' tends
to monotony ; nor was he quite sure in his employment
of the instrument which he discovered and divined.
The finest bursts of metrical music in his dramas seem

AfARLOlVE'S ORIGINALITY, 589

often the result of momentary inspiration rather than
the studied style of a deliberate artist^

This adaptation of blank verse to the romantic ^
drama, this blending of classic form with popular
material, and the specific heightening of both form
and matter by the application of poetic genius to the
task, constitutes Marlowe s claims to be styled the
father and the founder of our stage. We are so accus-
tomed to Shakspere that it is not easy to estimate the
full importance of his predecessor s revolution. Once "^
again, therefore, let us try to bear in mind the three
cardinal points of Marlowe s originality. In the first
place, he saw that the romantic drama, the drama of
the public theatres, had a great future before it. In
the second place, he saw that the playwrights of the
classic school had discovered the right dramatic metre.
In the third place, he raised both matter and metre,
the subjects of the romantic and the verse of the
classic school, to heights as yet unapprehended in his /
days. Into both he breathed the breath of life; heroic,
poetic, artistic, vivid with the spirit of his age. From
the chaotic and conflicting elements around him he
drew forth the unity of English Drama, and produced
the thing which was to be so great, is still so perfect.

Marlowe was fully aware of his object. The few
and seemingly negligent lines which serve as prologue
to ' Tamburlaine,' written probably when he was a

* These remarks on Marlowe's use of Blank Verse remain much as I
first wrote them in September 1864. Their substance I have already
published in Cornkill essays on * The Drama of Elizabeth and James ' and
* Blank Verse' (1865-6) and a Pall Mall Gazette article on * Marlowe'
(1867). After nearly twenty years I do not see reason to modify in any
essential points the panegyric I then penned, and which has been far
more eloquently uttered since by Mr. Swinburne.

590 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

youth of twenty-two, set forth his purpose in plain
terms :

From jigging veins of rhjining mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We '11 lead you to the stately tent of war ;
\\Tiere you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

In other words, Marlowe undertakes to wean the
public from its drolleries and merriments. He adver-
tises a metre hitherto unused upon the popular stage.
He promises an entertainment in which heroic actions
shall be displayed with the pomp of a new style. The
puerilities of clownage are to retire into the second
place. Yet the essential feature of the romantic drama,
its power to fascinate and please a public audience, is
not to be abandoned.

HI.

The importance of Blank Verse in the history of
English poetry, especially dramatic poetry, is so great
that Marlowe's innovations in the use of it demand a
somewhat lengthy introduction, in order that their
scope may be understood.

The single line, or tmit, in a blank verse period is
a line of normally five accents, of which the final accent
falls on the last syllable, or, if that syllable be not defi-
nitely accented, is supplied by the closing pause.^ It

* As the tenninal syllable in the classical metres may be long or short,
so the terminal syllable in blank verse may be accented or unaccented,
the close of the verse sufficing. Sophocles ends a line, e.g., with cXavycrc,
and Shakspere one with alacrity. This observation might lead to further
remarks upon what quantity and accent have in common, metrically
speaking ; but the inquiry would be too long.

THE NORMAL HEROIC LINE, 591

consists frequently, but by no means invariably, of ten
syllables. It has usually, but not inevitably, a more
or less discernible pause, falling after the fourth or
the sixth syllable. Out of these determinations, it is
possible to make or to select a typical line — the normal
line of English heroic rhythm. And for this purpose
we can do no better than choose the one indicated by
Johnson from Milton :

Love lights his lamp, and waves his purple wing.

Here it will be noticed we get five accents regularly
falling on the second syllable of each foot, and a pause
marked at the end of the fourth syllable. Such a line
may be termed the ideal line of English heroic pro-
sody ; and it is our business to keep its scheme some-
where, in however shadowy a shape, present to our
mind, in order to appreciate and judge the almost in-
numerable declensions from the type, which constitute
the variety and beauty of the metre in the handling
of great masters.

This line, which has become the standard metre
of serious English poetry in epic, story, idyll, satire,
drama, elegy, and meditative lyric, had been used from
early times anterior to its application to blank verse.
Chaucer and his followers employed it in the couplet
and rime royal ; Surrey, Wyatt, and Sidney in the
sonnet ; Spenser in the stanzas of the ' Faery Queen.'
But in the hands of these masters, and applied to these
purposes, the verse was still subservient to rhyme.
Surrey, in his translation of the ' ^^neid,' was the first
poet who attempted to free the measure from this
servitude. It is supposed that, in making his experi-

592 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

ment, he followed Italian models. The Italian heroic
verse, a line of five accents, but commonly of eleven
syllables, and not distinguished by a normal pause,
had undergone a similar transition from rhymed to un-
rhymed usage. Employed at first in the terza rima
of Dante, the ottava rima of Boccaccio, the sonnet of
Petrarch, it had been emancipated from rhyme by
Trissino, Rucellai, and Alamanni, writers of tragic,
epic, and didactic poems. Among the Italians the
transformed measure acquired the name of versi sciolti,
or verse freed from rhyme. Surrey is presumed to
have imitated the example of these poets when he
attempted what we call Blank Verse — verse, that is,
where the rhymes are blank or vacant. We may, at
any rate, affirm that Surrey's innovation rested on the
same scholastic basis as that of his Italian predecessors.
The humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance referred
all canons of artistic method to classical precedents.
The ancients did not rhyme. It seemed, therefore,
right and reasonable to these students of antiquity that
rhyme should be discarded. From this deliberate act
of reasoning proceeded the effort to dispense with
rhyme in the Italian versi scioiti TiSiA in English blank
verse. When the effort had been made in England,
and the practice of a hundred playwrights had proved it
successful, Milton theorised the system in his preface
to ' Paradise Lost : ' ^

The measure is English Heroic Verse, without Rime, as that of
Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin ; Rime being no necessary

* Ascham, in The Schoolmaster^ said all that needed to be said about
the place of rhyme in English poetry and its omission, before Milton made
his dictatorial remarks.

OMISSION OF RHYME. 593

Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works
especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wTetched
Matter and lame Meeter.

It was thus, obeying humanistic and Italian influ-
ences, that Surrey, followed by Sackville, Norton, and
Hughes, first discarded rhyme in the verse of five*
accents. Under the same influences, Sidney and his
coterie of learned poets attempted the Hexameter, the
Sapphic, Asclepiad, and other unrhymed classic metres
in the English tongue. The success of their ex-
periments was slight. These Latin measures never
took root in our literature ; whereas blank verse was
destined to a brilliant future. The reason for this dif-
ference is obvious. Sapphics, hexameters, asclepiads,
and so forth, are metres based on the principle of quan-
titative scansion, the effect of which can be but poorly
and awkwardly imitated by means of accent. They
are exotic to the English system of versification in
form and structure. The heroic line, on the contrary,
is native to our language ; combining, as the language
itself combines, indigenous Teutonic and exotic Latin
qualities. The omission of the rhyme, to which it
was originally linked, does not structurally alter it —
although, as will be afterwards observed, this omission
very essentially affects the mode of its employment
and the metrical effects of which it can be made the
vehicle.

The cultivated poets who first employed this un-
rhymed verse, were struck with the similarity it offered
to the Iambic measure of the ancients. Having studied
prosody in Greek and Latin metres, they app lied the
classical nomenclature of quantitative scansion to Eng-

0 0

594 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

lish rhythms. At the same time they overlooked this
important circumstance, that the heroic line fell short
of the Greek senarius by one whole foot. Hence, in
the very origin of metrical criticism, a slight but not
insignificant confusion was introduced ; for terms which
are proper to a quantitative system, and rules which
govern the Greek tragic senarius, will never exactly suit
another rhythm and a shorter line constructed on the
principle of accent. Iambs, trochees, dactyls, anapaests,
and other classical feet, from choriambi to molossi,
can indeed be found in every language, and may
be observed even in verses which do not owe to
them their melody. These feet represent fixed re-
lations in the value of syllables ; the word harmony in
English, for example, is both by quantity and accent
a dactyl. But the detection of these feet in accentual
verses does not throw any clear light on their scansion.
It may even lead to such misapprehensions of metrical
laws as Collier made, when he described Marlowe's
lines of five accents and eleven syllables as iambic
lines closed with trochees ; or as Todd made, when he
scanned two lines of Milton as iambics with *chor-
iambics in the third and fourth and in the fourth and
fifth places.' Trochees at the end of a tragic or a comic
Greek iambic, choriambics anywhere, would be wholly
inadmissible ; and thus the primal laws of classic
prosody are overlooked in the unintelligent effort to
apply them to a metre which is not quantitative but
accentual. That English verses can be quantitative,
as is proved by Tennyson's experiments in the Alcaic
and Hendecasyllabic metres, does not affect the ques-
tion. What we have to bear in mind is that the heroic

LICENTIATE IAMBIC. 595

English line, though similar in rhythm to the classical
iambic, is not a quantitative but an accentual verse,
and that its prosody cannot therefore be analysed by
a strict application of classical terms and rules.^

Starting with the notion that the heroic line was
what an old critic has called it, ' a licentiate iambic,'
the first writers of blank verse took pains to imitate
the iambic rhythm as closely as possible by alternating
an unaccented with an accented syllable throughout
the line. This process led them to end the line with
a strong monosyllable, and to isolate each verse. The
metre moved tamely thus :

O mother, thou to murder thus thy child !
Ah noble prince, how oft have I beheld !

George Gascoigne, in his short tract ' On the Making
of Verse in English,' was quick to perceive the con-
sequent impoverishment of rhythm. * Surely I can
lament,* he says, * that we are fallen into such a plain
and simple manner of writing that there is none other
foot used but one.' Gascoigne was well aware that
English prosody relied on accent ; and he described
this foot of whose tyranny he complained, as composed
' of two syllables, whereof the first is depressed or made
short, and the second is elevate or made long.' He
further pointed out that Chaucer had used greater liber-

' The redundant unaccented syllable at the end of the line, so
common in blank verse, would be sufficient to prove this point. When
the verse of five accents rhymed, a double rhyme was admissible, the
accent always falling on the penultimate syllable. When the rhyme was
removed, the same privilege remained to blank verse ; but this privilege
was not granted to the quantitative metres of antiquity. Euripides could
not have written :

ivravff 6 xiwaos eVrt * arjfKiov fie tovto.

QQ2

596 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

ties with metre ; ' and whosoever do peruse and well
consider his works, he shall find that although his lines
are not always of one self-same number of syllables,
yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the
longest verse and that which hath most syllables in it
will fall to the ear correspondent unto that which hath
fewest syllables in it ; and likewise, that which hath
in it fewest syllables, shall be found yet to consist of
words that have such natural sound, as may seem equal
in length to a verse which hath many more syllables
of lighter accents/ This passage contained the pith of
the whole matter ; and closer analysis of classic and
Italian metres led poets to the same result; namely,
that what they called ' the licentiate Iambic ' could be
written with far greater effect of melody and force of
rhetoric by varying the unit of the rhythm, or the
foot.

Here, however, intervened the great difificulty of
English scansion, so long as that scansion was still
referred to the quantitative theory. A Greek tragic
senarius consisted of six feet ; each foot consisted of a
short syllable followed by a long ; but in certain places
of the verse, in the first, third, and fifth, two longs
might be used. Thus the normal structure of the line

was this :

^- I -- I ^- I - I ^- I -- I

Furthermore, equivalents for both the iamb and the
spondee might be employed at fixed intervals ; and thus
the tribrach, anapaest, and dactyl were, under certain re-
strictions, admitted into the verse. The one inadmissible
foot was the trochee ; and the one invariable foot was an
lamb in the final place. Now, in order to imitate an

GREEK AND ENGLISH METRE. 597

iambic line upon the accentual system, it was necessary
to make an unaccented syllable pass for a short, and
an accented syllable for a long. According to the prac-
tice of Surrey and Sackville the imitative process seemed
easy, so long as the versifier confined himself to the
simple foot of which Gascoigne complained. He sacri-
ficed the native variety of the English rhythm, and did
not profit by the foreign varieties of the classical metre.
This was because he was working upon a radically
false theory. But no sooner did a poet arise who flung
theory to the winds and returned to the native liberty
of English accentual versification, than variety was at
once attained without the sacrifice of melody, but at the
same time the laws of classical or quantitative prosody
of the iambic had to be freely violated. Trochees
appeared in all places but the last, and chimerical
choriambi sprawled, to the purblind eyes of pedants,
over two feet. Take this line of Marlowe's for
example :

See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament

Scanned according to the nomenclature of classical
prosody this is a quinarius, with a trochee in the first
place, a spondee in the second, a trochee in the fourth,
and two iambs to wind up with. Take another line
from Shakspere :

Thy knee bussing the stones, — for in such business.

There is here a trochee in the second place, while the
fourth place has what cannot properly be called an
iamb or a trochee, and the whole verse is closed with
two strongly accented syllables followed by a redundant

598 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

syllable — a foot which must be quantitatively described
as a spondee with a short syllable over. It might
indeed be argued that though there is not enough accent
in the words * for in ' to make an accentual iamb or
trochee, yet they form a quantitative iamb. But if we
invoke quantity in this place we shall be met with
a palpable spondee in the last place. In fact, it is
inadmissible at one moment to use quantity and at
the next accent, for the sake of adapting English
to Greek scansion ; and this illustration proves how
dangerous it is to apply quantitative terms in the
analysis of an accentual scheme. Take yet another
line from Milton :

Burned after them to the bottomless pit.

This is equally monstrous, viewed as a tragic iambic
line, of the Greek type : a trochee in the first place,
an iamb in the second, followed by two successive
trochees and a final iamb. Take still another line from
Milton :

Me, me only, just object of his ire.

The first foot is a spondee or a trochee or an iamb,
according as we choose to emphasise. The second is a
trochee. The third is a spondee. The fourth becomes
an iamb by forcing an accent on the word ' of,' but is a
decided quantitative trochee. The fifth is, both accen-
tually and quantitatively, a good iamb. The awkward-
ness and indecision of scansion thus conducted prove
Its absurdity.

Such instances might be chosen from nearly every
page of every poet who has used blank verse with
spirit and variety. It is clear that the line which forms

QUANTITY AND ACCENT. 599

the unit of the measure is, to say the very least, an
exceedingly licentiate iambic. So long as our nomen- '
clature of prosody remains what it is, we may feel
obliged, when thinking of the normal blank verse line,
to describe it as an iambic, with laws and licences dif-
ferent from those of the Greek tragic metre. But this
necessity should not make us forget that those laws
and licences, on which its special quality depends, are
determined by the fact that it is accentual and not
quantitative ; and that, though accent may be made to
do the work of quantity, it imposes different conditions
on the prosody of which it forms the natural basis. A
rhythm born and bred in a nation which knew nothing
about quantity, a rhythm developed with variety by
Chaucer before the humanistic revival, has to be
studied in its origins and analysed according to its pri-
mitive structure Instead of scekinof to define its five
feet by terms of quantity, it were better to classify the
incidences of its accents, and to examine these in relation
to the pause ; keeping meanwhile suspended in our
memory the rhythm of the normal line, and testing by
this standard the divergences we notice.^ At the same
time we may profitably bear in mind that the dramatic
poets with whose work we have to deal, deliberately
sought to adapt their versification to Greek, Latin, and

' Great advance toward a sound theory of Enjjlish prosody has
recently been made by classifying the numerous cadences of blank verse
from the normal type. See, for instance, Dr. Abbott's Shakespearian
Grammar. But how uncertain the method of analysis still is, may be
perceived by comparing such an essay as this of Dr. Abbott's with Dr.
Guest's History of English Rhythms^ where a totally opposite theory is
supported with a vast mass of erudition. WTiatever may be thought
of his principles. Dr. Guest deserves the truest gratitude of students for
his minute investigation of the native English rhythms, out of which
the metres of our Renaissance period emerged.

Coo SIIAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Italian rules of prosody, as these had then been im-
perfectly analysed. On the Old English stock they
grafted slips of artful growth imported from their classic
and Italian studies. The developed blank verse of the
Elizabethan age is, therefore, a hybrid between a
native rhythm and an antique metre. Unless we grasp
this fact we shall miss some of the specific beauties of
a measure which, without ceasing to be native and
accentual, adopted qualities of rhetoric and movement
from the Attic stage, the Latin epic, and the Italian
imitators of the classic style.

Since blank verse is an accentual rhythm, it lends
itself with great effect to emphasis — for emphasis is
only enforced accent. The facility with which it can
be written, the monotony to which it is peculiarly
liable in the hands of a weak versifier, justify, nay,
almost necessitate, daring variations in its structure ;
and these variations assist rhetorical effects. In the
absence of rhyme one line can be linked to another
without injury, and periods may be formed, like those
of prose, in which phrase balances phrase, and the
music of language is drawn through sequences of
mutually helpful verses. The pause and stop, which
are important elements in English prosody, add another
element of variety, by allowing each line to be broken
in more than one place, and enabling a skilful crafts-
man to open and close periods of rhythmic melody at
several points in the structure. Reviewing these
qualities of English blank verse, we shall perceive that
it is an eminently dramatic metre. Its facility and
rapid movement bring it into close relation to the
speech of common life, and impose no shackling limita-

DRAMATIC BLANK VERSE, 6oi

tions upon dialogue. At the same time the fixed
element of rhythm raises it above colloquial language,
and renders even abrupt transitions from the pedes-
trian to the impassioned style of poetry both natural
and easy. The emphasis on which it mainly relies for
variety of music, gives scope to rhetoric. By shifting
the incidence of accent, a playwright not only animates
his verse and produces agreeable changes in the rhythm ;
but he also marks the meaning of his words, and yields
opportunities for subtly modulated declamation to the
actor. The same end is gained by altering the pauses,
on which a very wide scale of oratorical effects can be
touched. When Johnson complained that Milton *s
method of versification 'changes the measures of a
poet to the periods of a declaimer,' he laid his finger
on that quality of blank verse which is certainly a gain
to the Drama, whatever may be thought about its
value for the epic. The true and only way of appre-
ciating the melody of good blank verse is to declaim
it, observing how the changes in the rhythm obey the
poets meaning, and enforce the rhetoric he had in
view. Blank verse is, in fact, the nearest of all poetical
measures to prose ; yet it does not sacrifice the specific
note of verse, which is the maintenance of one selected
rhythm, satisfying the ear by repetition, and charming
it by variety within the compass of its formal
limitations.

Marlowe, with the instinct of genius, observed
these advantages of the unrhymed heroic measure, and
with the faculty of a great artist he solved the problem
of rendering it the supreme instrument of tragic poetry.
I nstead of the improver he may almost be called the

6o2 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

creator of blank verse ; for the mere omission of rhyme
in the metre of his predecessors did not suffice to con-
stitute what we now understand by blank verse. He
found the heroic line monotonous, monosyllabic, divided
into five feet of tolerably regular alternate shorts and
longs. He left it various in form and structure,
sometimes redundant by a syllable, sometimes deficient,
and animated by unexpected emphases and changes in
the pause. He found it a clumsy and mistaken imita-
tion of the classical iambic ; he restored it to its birth-
right as a native English rhythm. He found no
sequence of concatenated lines or attempt at periods —
one verse followed another in isolation, and all were
made after the same insipid model. He grouped his
lines according to the sense, allowing the thought con-
tained in his words to dominate their form, and carrying
the melody through several verses linked together by
rhetorical modulations. His metre did not preserve
one unalterable type, but assumed diversity of cadences,
the beauty of which depended on their adaptation to
the current of his ideas. By these means he produced
the double effect of unity and contrast ; maintained the
fixed march of his chosen rhythm ; and yet, by altera-
tion in the pauses, speed, and grouping of the syllables,
by changes in emphasis and accent, he made one
measure represent a thousand. His blank verse might
be compared to music, which demands regular rhythm,
but, by the employment of phrase, induces a higher
kind of melody to rise above the common and despotic
beat of time. Bad writers of blank verse, like Marlowe's
predecessors, or like those who in all periods have been
deficient in plastic energy and power of harmonious

MARLOWE'S TRAGIC METRE. 603

adaptation, sacrifice the poetry of expression, the force
of rhetoric, to the mechanism of their art.^ Metre
with them becomes a mere framework, ceases to be the
organic body of a vivifying thought. And bad critics
praise them for the very faults of tameness and
monotony, which they miscall regularity of numbers.
These faults, annoying enough to a good ear in stanzas
and rhymed couplets, are absolutely insufferable in
blank verse, which relies for melodious effect upon its
elasticity and pliability of cadence, and which is only
saved from insipidity by licences interpretative of the
poet's sense and demanded by his rhetoric.'

IV.

The creation of our tragic metre was not Marlowe's
only benefit conferred upon the stage. This was
indeed but the form corresponding to the new dramatic
method which he also introduced. He first taught *'
the art of designing tragedies on a grand scale, dis-
playing unity of action, unity of character, and unity
of interest. Before his day plays had been pageants
or versified tales, arranged in scenes, and enlivened
with ' such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.' He
first produced dramas worthy of that august title.

* In the progress of Shakspere's versification through three broadly N
marked stages, nothing is more noticeable than the changes whereby he
makes metre more and more obey the purposes of rhetoric, starting with
lines in which the sense is closed, advancing to lines in which the sense
is prolonged through periods, until at last the metre, though never
sacrificed, is nowhere forced upon our ear.

' Sufficient examples of Marlowe's versification will be given in
quotations below. I may refer my readers to three essays on Blank
Verse published in an appendix to my Sketches and Studies in Italy,

6o4 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Before his day it might have been reckoned doubtful
whether the rules and precedents of the Latin theatre
would not determine the style of tragic composition in
England as in Italy. After the appearance of * Tam-
burlaine/ it was impossible for a dramatist to attract
the public by any play which had not in it some por-
tion of the spirit and the pith of that decisive work.
How overwhelming was the influence of Marlowe can
be estimated by counting the few plays which survive
from the period before his revolution was effected.
From that great body of popular and courtly rubbish,
scornfully criticised or faintly praised by Sidney, we
possess two passable comedies, two stiff and anti-
quated tragedies, a rambling romance, a fustian historic
drama in doggerel rhyme, some delicate and graceful
masques in studied prose, a pleasant pastoral, and an
insufferable tale of chivalry in rhyming couplets of
fourteen syllables. I allude, of course, to * Roister
Doister,' ' Gammer Gurton's Needle,' * Gorboduc/
' The Misfortunes of Arthur,' * Cambyses,' Lyly's * Cam-
paspe ' and other pieces, ' The Arraignment of Paris,*
and *Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes.'^ *The iniquity
of oblivion,' in this case not ' blindly scattering her
poppies,' has covered up and sealed from sight un-
reckoned multitudes of raw, imperfect essays — the
delight of a rude age — the nebulous and seething mass
from which the planetary system of Shaksperian Drama
was to issue. Of only a very few can it be said with
any certainty that they emerged into the light of
publicity before Marlowe shook the stage. What re-
mains of Greene's, Peek's, Lodge's, and Nash's work,

* I cannot find valid reasons for assigning this last piece with
absolute certainty to Peele.

MARLOWE'S CONCEPTION OF TRAGEDY, 605

with the exception of ' The Arraignment of Paris/ is
posterior to Marlowe, The same may be asserted,
though perhaps with diffidence, of Kyd's two tragedies.
Thus even over the inferior productions of the six-
teenth century upon its close, had passed the swift
transforming spirit of the master. It was the central
fire of Marlowe's genius which hardened that dull and
shapeless matrix of English dramatic poetry, and ren-
dered it capable of crystallising flawless and light-
darting gems. When we remember that Marlowe,
born in the same year as Shakspere, died at the early
age of twenty-nine, while Shaksperes genius was
still, so far as the public was concerned, almost a poten-
tiality ; when we reflect upon the life which Marlowe
had to lead among companions of debauch in London,
and further estimate the degradation of the art he
raised so high, we are forced to place him among the
most original creative poets of the world. His actual
achievement may be judged imperfect, unequal, im-
mature, and limited. Yet nothing lower than the
highest rank can be claimed for one who did so much,
in a space of time so short, and under conditions so
unfavourable. What Shakspere would have been
without Marlowe, how his far more puissant hand and
wonder-working brain would have moulded English
Drama without Marlowe, cannot even be surmised.
What alone is obvious to every student is that Shak-
spere deigned from the first to tread in Marlowe's
footsteps, that Shakspere at the last completed and
developed to the utmost that national embryo of art
which Marlowe drew fortli from the womb of darkness,
anarchy, and incoherence.

6o6 SHAfCSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

About Marlowe there is nothing small or trivial.
His verse is mighty ; his passion is intense ; the out-
lines of his plots are large ; his characters are Titanic ;
his fancy is extravagant in richness, insolence, and
pomp. Marlowe could rough-hew like a Cyclops,
though he was far from being able to finish with the
subtlety and smoothness of a Praxiteles. We may
compare his noblest studies of character with marbles
blocked out by Michel Angelo, not with the polished
perfection of *La Notte' in San Lorenzo. Speaking of
' Dr. Faustus/ Goethe said with admiration : * How
greatly it is all planned ! ' Greatly planned, and
executed with a free, decisive touch, that never hesi-
tates and takes no heed of modulations. It is this
vastness of design and scale, this simplicity and cer-
tainty of purpose, which strikes us first in Marlowe.
He is the sculptor-poet of Colossi, aiming at such effects
alone as are attainable in figures of a superhuman size,
and careless of fine distinctions or delicate gradations
in their execution. His characters are not so much
human beings, with the complexity of human attributes
combined in living personality, as types of humanity,
the animated moulds of human lusts and passions
which include, each one of them, the possibility of
many individuals. They * are the embodiments or the
exponents of single qualities and simple forces.' ^ This

' So Mr. Swinburne has condensed the truth of this matter in his
Study of Shakcspeire. Professor Dowden has written to hke effect in an
essay on Marlowe, pubhshed in the Forfniirhfly Ri'view^ Janmry iS/d.

COLOSSAL SCALE OF HIS ART. 607

tendency to dramatise ideal conceptions, to vitalise
character with one dominant and tyrannous motive, is
very strong in Marlowe. Were it not for his own
fiery sympathy with the passions thus idealised, and
for the fervour of his conceptive faculty, these colossal
personifications might have been insipid or frigid. As
it is, they are far from deserving such epithets. They
are redeemed from the coldness of symbolic art, from
the tiresomeness of tragic humours, by their author s
intensity of conviction. Marlowe is in deadly earnest
while creating them, believes in their reality, and in-
fuses the blood of his own untamable heart into their
veins. We feel them to be day-dreams of their maker s
deep desires ; projected from his subjectivity, not
studied from the men around him ; and rendered
credible by sheer imaginative insight into the dark
mysteries of nature. A poet with a lively sense of
humour might, perhaps, have found it impossible to
conceive and sustain passions on so exorbitant a scale
with so little relief, so entire an absence of mitigating
qualities. But it was precisely on the side of humour
that Marlowe showed his chief inferiority to Shak-
spere. That saving grace of the dramatic poet he
lacked altogether. And it may also be parenthentically
noticed as significant in this respect that Marlowe
never drew a woman*s character. His Abigail is a
mere puppet. Isabella, in his * Edward 11./ changes
suddenly from almost abject fawning on her husband
to no less abject dependence on an ambitious paramour.
His Dido owes such power as the sketch undoubtedly
possesses to the poetry of the Fourth /Eneid.

6o8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

VI.

It IS no function of sound criticism to decoct a
poet's work into its final and residual essence, deducing
one motive from the complex efforts and the casual
essays of a mind placed higher ex hypoihcsi in the
creative order than the critic s own ; or inventing a
catch-word whereby some incommensurable series of
achievements may be ticketed. And yet, such is the
nature of Marlowe's work, that it imperatively indicates
a leading motive, irresistibly suggests a catch-word.
This leading motive which pervades his poetrj^ may
be defined as L'Ainoiir dc F Impossible — the love or
lust of unattainable things ; beyond the reach of phy-
sical force, of sensual faculty, of mastering will ; but
not beyond the scope of mans inordinate desire,
mans infinite capacity for happiness, mans ever-craving
thirst for beauty, power, and knowledge. This catch-
word of the Impossible Amour is thrust by Marlowe
himself, in the pride of his youthful insolence and law-
lessness of spiritual lusts, upon the most diffident and
sober of his critics. Desire for the impossible — im -
possible not because it transcends human appetite or
capacity, but because it exhausts human faculties in the
infinite pursuit — this is the region of Marlowe's sway
as poet. To this impossible, because unlimited, object
of desire he adds another factor, suggested by his souls
revolt against the given order of the world. He and
the Titanic characters into whom he has infused his
spirit — even as a workman tlirough the glass-pipe
blows life-breath into a bubble, permanent so lonjr as

LOVE OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS. 609

the fine vitreous form endures — he and all the creatures
of his fancy thirst for things beyond man's grasp, not
merely because these things exhaust man's faculties in
the pursuit, but also because the full fruition of them
has been interdicted. Thus Marlowe's lust for the
impossible, the lust he has injected like a molten fluid
into all his eminent dramatic personalities, is a desire
for joys conceived by the imagination, floating within
the boundaries of will and sense at some fixed moment,
but transcending these firm limitations, luring the
spirit onward, exhausting the corporeal faculties, en-
gaging the soul itself in a strife with God. This lust
assumes the shape of thirst for power, of thirst for
beauty, of thirst for knowledge. It is chiefly thirst for
power which animates this poet and his brood. When
knowledge, as in Faustus, seems to be the bait, that
knowledge will conduce to power. But there is a
carnal element in the desire itself, a sensuality which
lends a grip to Belial on the heart-strings of the lust.
This sometimes soars aloft in aspirations, exhales itself
in longings after Helen, the world's queen of loveliness,
evoked from Hades ; sometimes it sinks to avaricious,
solitary, gluttonous delight in gems. It resolves itself
again into the thirst for power when we find that the
jewels of Barabas are hugged and gloated over for their
potency of buying states, corrupting kingdoms ; when
we see that the wraith of Helen has been dragged from
Lethe to flatter a magician's vision of omnipotence.

Let us fix the nature of this leading motive by some
salient passages from Marlowe's dramas. I take the
rudest and the crudest first. In the ' Massacre at
Paris ' the Duke of Guise should not properly have

K K

6io SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

been displayed as more than what world-history reveals
to us — a formidable rival of the House of Valois on the
throne, a bloody and unscrupulous foe of the Huguenot
faction. But the spirit of Marlowe entering into the
unwieldy carcass he has framed for this great schemer,
breathes these words :

Oft have I levelled, and at last have learned
That peril is the chiefest way to happiness,
And resolution honour's fairest aim.
What glory is there in a common good,
That hangs for every peasant to achieve ?
That like I best, that flies beyond my reach.

The central passion which inspires Marlowe and all
the characters of Marlowe's coinage finds utterance
here. The Guise seeks happiness through peril ; finds
honour only in a fierce resolve ; flings common felicity
to the winds ; strains at the flying object of desire
beyond his grasp. Then he turns to the definite point
of his ambition :

Set me to scale the high pyramides,
And thereon set the diadem of France ;
I '11 either rend it with my nails to nought.
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings.
Although my downfall be the deepest hell.

Before his imagination hangs the desired thing ; it is
the crown of France. It is placed upon a pyramid
beyond his reach ; but he can soar to it on wings of
will and desperate endeavour. Wings are needed for
the adventure ; no scaling steps will serve his turn.
Whether he shatter the crown to atoms in the assault,
or beat his pinions round about it in the gust of victory,
concerns not the present mood of his desire. Nor does
it signify whether he seize and wear it, or tumble head-

LUST OF EMPIRE. 6il

long into the abyss of ruin. The thirst, the lust of
the impossible allures his soul.

This, as I have said, is the barest, nakedest exhibi-
tion of Marlowes leading motive. He framed one
character in which the desire of absolute power is para-
mount ; this is Tamburlaine. When the shepherd-
hero is confronted with the vanquished king of Persia
he pours himself forth in a monologue which voices
Marlowe through the puppet s lips :

The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,
And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
Mov'd me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove ?
Nature, that fram'd us of four elements
VVarrmg within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds :
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite.
And always moving as the restless spheres.
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest.
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.
That perfect bliss and sole felicity.
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

It is Nature herself, says Tamburlaine, who placed a
warfare of the elements within the frame of man ; she
spurs him onward by an inborn need toward empire. It
is our souls, uncircumscribed by cosmic circumstances,
free to weigh planets in their courses and embrace the
universe with thought, that compel men to stake their
all on the most perilous of fortune s hazards. In this
speech the poet, who framed Tamburlaine, identifies
himself with his creation, forgets the person he has

R R 2

6i2 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

made, and utters through his mouth the poetry of his
desire for the illimitable.

There was a side-blow aimed at knowledge in this
diatribe of Tamburlaine on power. See now how
Faustus answers, abyss calling to abyss from the same
abysmal depth of the creator s mind :

Divinity, adieu !
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly ;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters ;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence.
Is promised to the studious artisan !
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command : emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces ;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ;
A sound magician is a demigod :
Here tire, my brains, to gain a deit)'.

On the ordinary paths of learning, logic, philosophy,
physic, law, divinity, Faustus finds himself cramped, tied
to dry rules, confined within the circle of diurnal occu-
pations. These things may be done for service of
man's common needs ; but there lies — or he divines
there lies — beyond the reach of all such vulgar and
trivial ways a far more hazardous path, a path which by
assiduous study and emperilment of self shall lead to
empire. He knows that the souls welfare is engaged
in the endeavour; but the conqueror will sway through-
out his lifetime a kingdom commensurate with the
mind of man. To gain this knowledge, to possess the
power that it confers, becomes the passion of his
nature. He therefore also yields, and yields with open

DESIRE OF BEAUTY. 613

eyes, to the allurements of impossible desire. When he
has sold his soul, the price appears a little thing :

Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I 'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

Descending from the high imaginative region in which
Faustus moves, travelling back from the dim realms
of Ind, where Tamburlaine defies the Fates, reaching
England under the reign of our second Edward, we
find the same chord touched in Marlowe's Mortimer.
Upon the point of death, checkmated and flung like
the Guise * to deepest hell,' he still maintains the old
indomitable note, the key-note of the leading motive :

Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which when men aspire
They tumble headlong down : that i)oint I touch'd.
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall ? —
Farewell, fair queen : weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller.
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

I have pursued the leading motive, applied the
catch-word, through many examples bearing on the
theme of power. It remains to select one passage in
which the same lust for the impossible shall be ex-
hibited when Marlowe turns his thought to beauty.
Xenocrate, the love of Tamburlaine, is absent and
unhappy. The Tartar chief is left alone to vent his
passion in soliloquy. At first he dwells upon the causes
of her sorrow, with such * lyrical interbreathings ' as
this, evoked from the recollection of her —

Shining face.
Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits
And comments volumes with her ivory pen.

6i4 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Gradually he passes into that vein of meditation,
which allows the poet's inspiration to transpire. Then
Marlowe speaks, and shows in memorable lines that
beauty has, no less than power, her own impossible,
for which he thirsted :

What is beauty, sayeth my sufferings, then ?
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admirM themes ;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit ;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness.
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least.
Which into words no virtue can digest.

The impossible beauty, on which Tamburlaine here
meditates, is beauty eluding the poet and the artist in
their highest flight ; that apple topmost on the topmost
bough, which the gatherers have not overlooked, but
leave perforce, because they strove in vain to reach it.
It is always this beauty, inflaming the artist's rather
than the lover s soul, which Marlowe celebrates. He
has written no drama of love ; and even in * Hero and
Leander,' that divinest dithyramb in praise of sensual
beauty, the poet moves in a hyperuranian region, from
which he contemplates with eyes of equal adoration
all the species of terrestrial loveliness. The tender
emotions and the sentiment of love were alien to Mar-
lowe's temper. It may even be doubted whether
sexual pleasures had any very powerful attraction for

SUPERSENSUAL BEAUTY. 615

his nature. To such, we think, he gave his cruder,
poetry-exhausted moments. When he evoked the
thought of women to tempt Doctor Faustus, he touched
this bass-chord of carnal desire with the hand of a
poet-painter rather than a sensualist :

Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.

Yet it was in no Platonic mood that he set those
mighty sails of his imagination to the breeze upon the
sea of Beauty. That thirst for the impossible, when
once applied to things of sense and loveliness, is a lust
and longing after the abstraction of all beauties, the
self of sense, the quintessence of pleasures. This is,
of course, the meaning of Faustus' address to Helen,
summoned from the ghosts as the last tangible reality
of beauty, to give comfort to his conscience-laden soul :

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ? —

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. — [Kisses her.

Her lips suck forth my soul : see, where it flies ! —

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air.
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars ;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele ;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms ;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour !

The same triumphant sense of having conquered the
unconquerable, and enjoyed the final gust of pleasure

6i6 S/lAKSpJiKE'S PRKDECESSORS,

in things deemed impossible for men, emerges in
another speech of Faustus :

Have I not made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and CEnon's death ?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mcphistophilis ?

When Xenocrate is dying Tamburlaine pours forth a
monody, which, however misplaced on his lips, gives
Marlowe scope to sing the nuptial hymn of beaut)'
unapproachable, withdrawn from * loathsome earth,'
returning to her native station in the heavens. There,
and there only, says the poet, shall the spirit mate
with loveliness and be at peace in her embrace :

Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,

As sentinels to warn the immortal souls

To entertain divine Xenocrate . . .

The cherubins and holy seraphins,

That sing and play before the King of kings,

Use all their voices and their instruments

To entertain divine Xenocrate ;

And in this sweet and curious harmony,

The god that tunes this music to our souls

Holds out his hand in highest majesty

To entertain divine Xenocrate.

Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts

Up to the palace of the empyreal heaven,

That this my life may be as short to me

As are the days of sweet Xenocrate.

In this rapturous and spiritual marriage-song, which
celebrates the assumption or apotheosis of pure beauty,
the master bends his mighty line to uses of lyric
poetry, as though a theme so far above the reach of
words demanded singing.

Dwelling upon these passages, we are led to

MARLOWE AND TANNHAUSER. 617

wonder what a drama Marlowe would have written if
the story of Tannhauser had been known to him. As
in the Faust-legend the thirst for illimitable power, so
in the Tannhauser-legend the thirst for illimitable
pleasure leads a human soul to self-abandonment.
The imaginative region of each legend is equally
vast ; the lust in either case is equally transcendent ;
the sacrifice accomplished by both heroes to an infinite
desire is equally complete. In his first dramatic
creation, Tamburlaine, Marlowe interwove the double
strings of this Impossible Amour. In his second,
Faustus, he developed the theme of knowledge de-
sired for power's sake upon earth. In Tannhauser, if
that had been his third creation, he might have
painted what he knew so well and felt so deeply,
the poet's thirst for beauty's self, his purchase at the
soul's price of unmeasured rapture in a goddess' arms.
He would assuredly not have suffered this high mystic
theme to degenerate into any mere vulgarities of a
sensual Venus-berg. Rather may we imagine that
Marlowe would have shown how the desire for beauty
beyond human reach is a form of the soul's desire for
power — no trivial thirst for pleasure, but a longing to
achieve the unattainable, and hold in human grasp the
bliss reserved for gods. But such speculations, if not
wholly idle, only serve to cast a side-light on that con-
ception of Marlowe's leading motive which I have
endeavoured to develop. As it was, his third creation,
Barabas, incarnated a lower form of the same insatiable
longing. Ambition, the desire of empire, the adora-
tion of beauty, the control of power by means of
superhuman knowledge, yield place here to avarice. But

6i8 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

the avarice of the Jew of Malta is so colossal, so tem-
pered with a sensuous love of rarity and beauty in
the priceless gems he hoards, so delirious in its rap-
tures, so subservient to ungovernable hatred and
vindictive exercise of power conferred by wealth upon
its owner, that we dare not call even this baser exhibi-
tion of the Impossible Amour ignoble. Swinburne,
who cannot assuredly be arraigned for want of sym-
pathy with Marlowe, has styled Barabas ' a mere
mouthpiece for the utterance of poetry as magnificent
as any but the best of Shakespeare's/ With this
verdict we must unwillingly concur. Considering the
rapid and continual descent from bathos unto bathos
after the splendid first and second acts, so large in
outline, so vigorous in handling, so rich in verse,
through the mad abominations and hysterical melo-
drama of the last three acts; no sane critic will maintain
that the * Jew of Malta ' was a love-child of its maker's
genius. One only hypothesis saves Marlowe's fame,
and explains the patent inequalities of his third tragedy
— beginning, as it does, with the face and torso of a
Centaur, ending in the impotent and flabby coils of a
poisonous reptile. It is that stage-necessities and
press of time compelled the poet to complete in haste
as task-work what he had conceived with love, and
blocked out at his leisure. Brief indeed, we fancy,
must have been the otia dia of this poet.

But I must return to my main argument, and show
with what a majestic robe of imperial purple Marlowe's
imagination has draped the poor and squalid skeleton
of avarice. This he has done by drawing that * least
erected ' vice within the sphere of his illimitable lust.

TRANSFIGURED AVARICE. 619

The opening soliloquy, when Barabas is ' discovered
in his counting-house, with heaps of gold before him,'
amply suffices to prove the point :

So that of thus much that return was made ;

And of the third part of the Persian ships

There was the venture summ'd and satisfied.

As for those Samnites and the men of Uz,

That brought my Spanish oils and wines of Greece,

Here have I purs*d their paltry silvcrlings.

Fie, what a trouble 't is to count this trash !

Well fare the Arabians, who so richly pay

The things they traffic for with wedge of gold,

Whereof a man may easily in a day

Tell that which may maintain him all his life.

The needy groom, that never fingered groat.

Would make a miracle of thus much coin ;

But he whose steel-barr'd coffers are cramm'd full.

And all his life-time hath been tirM,

Wear}'ing his fingers' ends with telling it,

Would in his age be loath to labour so,

And for a pound to sweat himself to death.

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines.

That trade in metal of the purest mould ;

The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks

Without control can pick his riches up,

And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,

Receive them free, and sell them by the weight ;

Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

Jacynths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds.

Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds.

And seld-seen costly stones of so great price.

As one of them indifferently rated.

And of a carat of this quantity,

May serve, in peril of calamity.

To ransom great kings from captivity.

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth ;

And thus methinks should men of judgment frame

Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade.

And, as their wealth incrcaseth, so inclose

Infinite riches in a little room.

In the course of the tragedy, Barabas is despoiled by

620 S/IAKSFERK'S PKICDFCFSSORS.

Christians of the bulk of his wealth. His house
has been turned into a nunnery; and there, in an
upper chamber, lies secreted a hoard of gems and
gold, known only to himself. In order to obtain pos-
session of this treasure he makes his daughter Abigail
assume the veil, using her feigned conversion, as he
also uses her fictitious love-caresses, to defeat his foes.
The situation in which Abigail is thus placed by her
father bears a strong resemblance to that of the girl
in Tourguenieff's tale ' Le Juif.' What Marlowe
reached upon the path of powerful imagination — a
depth below all depths conceivable of cynicism — the
Russian novelist revealed as proper to the nature of a
Polish Jew. Outcast from society, degraded by the
lust of gain, a Jew will seem to sell his daughter,
relying all the while upon that purity, protected by
the hatred for an alien race, which makes a Christian's
love as little moving to her woman's instinct as the
passion of a hound or horse might be. This, it may
be parenthetically said, is one of the strongest extant
instances of idealistic art corroborated and verified by
realism.

While Barabas is skulking below his daughter's
window in uncertainty and darkness, awaiting the
moment when Abigail shall disinter his money-bags,
Marlowe seizes the occasion for heightening his avarice
to passion :

Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak.
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings,
Vex*d and tormented runs jxjor Barabas
With fatal curses towards these Cliristians.

nARABAS AND ABIGAIL, 621

The incertain pleasures of swift-footed time
Have ta'en their flight, and left me in despair ;
And of my former riches rests no more
But bare remembrance ; like a soldier's scar,
That has no further comfort for his maim. —
O Thou, that with a fiery pillar ledd'st
The sons of Israel through the dismal shades,
Light Abraham's offspring ; and direct the hand
Of Abigail this night ! or let the day
Turn to eternal darkness after this ! —
No sleep can fasten on my watchful eyes.
Nor quiet enter my distemper'd thoughts
Till I have answer of my Abigail.

Abigail now appears upon the upper platform of the
theatre. The spectators see her at work, searching
for the hidden store. Her father is still unaware of
her presence. Hovering disquieted and sick with
fear, he seems to his own fancy like the ghosts which
haunt old treasuries and guard the hoards of buried
men :

Now I remember those old women's words,
Who in my wealth w^ould tell me winter's tales.
And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night
About the place where treasure hath been hid :
And now methinks that I am one of those ;
For, whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope,
And, when I die, here shall my spirit walk.

When at length she flings him down the bags, it is
as though the sun had risen on the darkness of his
soul :

O my girl.
My gold, my fortune, my felicity,
Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy ;
Welcome the first beginner of my bliss !
O Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too !
Then my desires were fully satisfied :
But I will practise thy enlargement thence :
O girl ! O gold I O beauty ! O my bliss ! [Hugs the bags.

622 s/nk'sr/:Rirs pricdkclssoj^s.

He abandons himself to the transport of the moment
so wildly, that Abigail has to remind him of the
peril of discovery. Lifted into poetry by passion,
Barabas wafts his daughter a parting kiss, and calls
upon the day to rise, the lark to soar into the heavens,
while his uplifted spirit floats and sings above his
gems, as the swift bird above her younglings in the
nest :

Farewell, my joy, and by my fingers take
A kiss from him that sends it from his soul. —
Now, Pluebus, ope the eye-lids of the day,
And, for the raven, wake the morning lark,
That I may hover with her in the air,
Singing o'er these, as she does o'er her young.
Hermoso placer de los dineros !

The passage in this short scene from midnight gloom
and meditations upon wandering ghosts to day-spring,
joy, and plans for future vengeance — from the black
raven to the morning lark — is so swift and so poetically
tnie, that Mammon for one moment walks before us
clothed in light ; not sullen with the sultry splendours
and material grossness of the 'Alchemist' (though
these are passionate in their own cumbrous style), but
airy and ethereal, a spiritual thing, a bright * unbodied
joy.'

VII.

In dealing with Marlowe, it is impossible to sepa-
rate the poet from the dramatist, the man from his
creations. His personality does not retire, like Shak-
spere's, behind the work of art into impenetrable
mystery. Rather, like Byron, but with a truer faculty
for dramatic presentation than Byron possessed, he

PORTRAIT OF TAMBURLAINE, 623

inspires the principal characters of his tragedies with
the ardour, the ambition, the audacity of his own
restless genius. Tamburlaine, who defies heaven,
and harnesses kings and princes of the East to his
chariot, who ascends his throne upon the necks of
prostrate emperors, and burns a city for his consort's
funeral pyre, embodies the insolence of his creators
spirit. At the same time, in this haughty and aspiring
shepherd the historic Tartar chief is firmly rendered
visible. Through Tamburlaine s wild will and im-
perturbable reliance upon destiny, the brute instincts
of savage tribes yearning after change, pursuing con-
quest and spreading desolation with the irresistible
impulse of a herd of bisons marching to their fields
of salt, emerge into self-consciousness. Marlowe has
traced the portrait with a bold hand, filling its details
in with broad and liberal touches :

Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned,
Like his desires, lift upward and divine ;
So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit.
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear

Old Atlas's burden

Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion.
Thirsting with sovereignty ajid love of arms \
His lofty brows in folds do figure death,
And in their smoothness amity and life ;
About them hangs a knot of amber hair,
Wrapped in curls, as fierce Achilles* was,
On which the breath of heaven delights to play,
Making it dance in wanton majesty ;
His arms and fingers, long and sinewy,
Betokening valour and excess of strength ;
In every part proportioned like the man
Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine.

This is the picture drawn of him at the beginning of

624 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

his fortunes by a generous enemy. There is a mag-
netism in the presence of the man. A Persian cap-
tain, commissioned to overawe and trample down his
pride, no sooner sees Tamburlaine than he falls a
victim to his influence :

His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods ;

His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth,

As if he now desired some stratagem,

Or meant to pierce Avernus' darksome vaults,

To pull the triple- headed dog from hell.

Tamburlaine, on his side, favours the manly bearing
of his foe, and bids him welcome with such words as
bind the captain to his cause :

Forsake thy king, and do but join with me.
And we will triumph over all the world ;
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains.
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about ;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Such confidence is contagious, imposing, as Napoleon s
belief in his star imposed, and working out its own
accomplishment. His most powerful opponents recog-
nise the spell, and are cowed by it :

Some powers divine, or else infernal, mixed
Their angry seeds at his conception ;
For he was never sprung of human race.
Since with the spirit of his fearful pride
He dares so doubtlessly resolve of rule,
And by profession be ambitious.

With the unresisted advance of his arms, and the
tumbling down of empires at his approach, the con-
viction of his destiny grows on Tamburlaine :

Where'er I come the fatal Sisters sweat,
And grisly Death, by running to and fro,

THE SCOURGE OF GOD, 625

To do their ceaseless homage to my sword.

Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx,
Waiting the back return of Charon's boat ;
Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men,
That I have sent from sundry foughten fields
To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven.

The lust for sovereignty passes into blind, bewildering
lust for blood and overthrow ; from the midst of which
emerges a belief in his commission from God to scourge
the nations :

I will, with engines never exercised.
Conquer, sack, and utterly consume
Your cities and your golden palaces ;
And, till by vision or by speech I hear
Immortal Jove say, Cease, my Tamburlaine !
I will persist a terror to the world.
Making the meteors (that, like armfed men,
Are seen to march upon the towers of heaven)
Run tilting round about the firmament.
And break their burning lances in the air.
For honour of my wondrous victories.

Filled now with the notion that he is Flagellum Det^
he bears a scourge aloft among his ensigns and his
* coal-black colours ' :

There is a God, full of revenging wrath,

From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks.

Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.

If Tamburlaine were asked what God he follows, he
could hardly give that God a name. It is his own
Genius, the Genius of tyranny, destruction, slaughter.
Yet this hyperbolical monster moves admiration rather
than loathing. Marlowe has succeeded in saving his
hero, amid all his * lunes ' from caricature, by the in-
breathed spirituality with which he sustains his madness

s s

626 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

at its height. The last scene he wrote for Tambur-
laine is impressive in its dignity ; torrid -with the heat
of Asia's sun descending to the caves of night through
brazen heavens. There are no more kingdoms left
for Tamburlaine to conquer, and the Titanic marauder
feels his strength ebbing :

What daring god torments my body thus.
And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine ?
Shall sickness prove me now to be a man,
I'hat have been termed the terror of the world ?
Techelles and the rest, come, take your swords,
And threaten him whose hand afflicts my soul !
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven.
And set black streamers in the firmament.
To signify the slaughter of the gods.

Alas ! these are but idle vaunts, and Tamburlaine is
now aware of it. Even for would-be deicides death
waits.

Ah, friends, what shall I do ? I cannot stand.

This is the one solitary cry of weakness wrung from
the death-smitten tiger. Pain racks him. His cap-
tains comfort him by saying that such pain as this
must pass ; it is too violent. Then he bursts into the
most magnificent of all his declamations, pointing to
the bony skeleton who followed like a hound upon his
heels across so many battle-fields, and who, all-terrified,
is lurking now to paralyse the hand which surfeited
his jaws with slaughter :

Not last, Techelles ? No ! for I shall die.
See where my slave, the ugly monster Death,
Shaking and (luivering, pale and wan for fear.
Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,
Who flies away at every glance I give.
And when I look away, comes stealing on.

EXTRAVAGANCES OF ' TAMBURLAINE? 627

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field !
I and mine armies come to load thy back
With souls of thousand mangled carcasses.
Look, where he goes ! but see, he comes again.
Because I stay ! Techelles, let us march.
And weary Death with bearing souls to hell.

After this, the scene proceeds upon a graver and more
tranquil note of resignation, abdication, and departure,
Tamburlaine retains his stout heart and high stomach
to the end, but he bows to the inevitable and divides
his power among his sons. His body, the souVs sub-
ject, though it break beneath the stress of those fierce
passions, shall survive and be his children's heritage :

But, sons, this subject, not of force enough
To hold the fiery spirit it contains,
Must part, imparting his impressions
By equal portions into both your breasts.
My flesh, divided in your precious shapes.
Shall still retain my spirit, though I die,
And live in all your seeds immortally.

There is surely enough of absurdity and extrava-
gance in the two parts of * Tamburlaine.' Relays of cap-
tive monarchs, fattened on raw meat and * pails of musca-
del,* draw the heros chariot. A king and queen dash
out their brains against the cage in which they are
confined. Virgins are ravished and mangled, king-
doms overrun, and cities burned to satisfy a whim.
Tamburlaine kills one of his three sons because he is
a coward, and rips up the flesh of his own left arm to
teach his other sons endurance. Blood flows in rivers.
Shrieks and groans and curses mingle with heaven-
defying menaces and ranting vaunts. The action is
one tissue of violence and horror. The language is

truculent bombast, tempered with such bursts of poetry

ss 2

628 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

as I have prudently selected in my specimens.^ Yet
in spite of preposterousness, more than enough in
volume and monotonous variety to justify Mine
Ancient's huffing vein of parody, the vast and power-
ful conception of the Tartar conqueror redeems * Tam-
burlaine ' from that worst bathos, the bathos of involun-
tary caricature. Marlowe knew well what he was after.
He produced a dramatic poem which intoxicated the
audience of the London play-houses with indescribable
delight, and which inaugurated a new epoch. Through
the cloud-world of extravagance which made ' Tambur-
laine ' a byword, he shot one ray of light, clear still,
and excellent in the undaunted spirit of the hero.

VIII.

Not long before the composition of Marlowe's
* Doctor Faustus/ a prose version of the life, adven-
tures, and dreadful death of the famous magician had
appeared in Germany. It was printed in 1587 by
John Speig at Frankfort. A reprint of this edition
issued from the press in 1588 ; and in 1589 the same,
with some considerable alterations and additions, was
repeated. Before 1593 the tale of Faust had acquired
such popularity that a continuation, entitled the * Wag-
nerbuch,' was produced; and again, in 1599, another

* In the passage proverbial for bombast which begins :

liolla, ye pampered jades of Asia !
What can ye draw but twenty miles a day,

our imagination is still recreated by such lines as these :

The horbe that guide the golden eye of heaven ,
And blow the morning from their nostrils.
Making their hcry g;ut abuvc tlie cloud^:.

THE FAUST LEGEND. 629

version of the story, inferior to that of Speig, was pub-
lished by Moller at Hamburgh. Thus in the space of
eleven years five several editions of the legend- of
Faust were needed to satisfy the curiosity of the
German public. It may be noticed that all these
works had a distinctly Protestant tendency. They
were soon translated into other languages. The Eng-
lish received a version of the Frankfort issue of 1 588
from the press of Thomas Orwin — ^probably in the same
year. A revised edition was published in 1592 ; and,
as early as the year 1588, a ballad on the * Life and
Death of Doctor Faustus * had been licensed by
Aylmer, Bishop of London. The * Wagnerbuch,'
adapted and altered for English readers, saw the light
in 1 594 ; and thus the English were placed in full
possession of the German Faustiad. Meanwhile
Marlowe's tragedy, which may have been exhibited
in 1589, had made the larger outlines of the legend
popular upon the stage.

This legend has been rightly called a Faustiad.
No epic of the Middle Ages condenses within shorter
compass the spirit, sentiment, and science of that
period, then drawing to its close, upon the eve of the
great modem revolution. It depicts the fears and
passions of the times which preluded the Renaissance ;
epitomises medieval knowledge ; expresses the mingled
reverence for learning and dread of occult lore which
distinguished an age intellectually impotent, but plagued
with the longing after mysteries beyond the grasp of
men ; traces in hard, grim outlines the sinister religious
superstition, the constitutional melancholy, the despe-
rate revolt against intolerable mental bondage, the

630 SHAh'SPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

grotesque hysterical amusemenLs as of some para-
lytic but gigantic infant, and the inordinate desire to
penetrate forbidden secrets, out of which emerged the
belief in magic and the ghastly realities of witchcraft,
no less than the exuberant forces of the modem world.
This epic is strictly Northern and Teutonic. There is
no conceivable period of Italian literature in which it
could have been created. The cold, remorseless reve-
lation of Hell, accepted in its recognised eternity of
torments by a soul made reckless with the ennui and
stagnation of a present life too empty and too pleasure-
less to be endured, breathes the stoical courage, the
scornful imagination of Beowulf's posterity. The
purchase of knowledge, power, and enjoyment by a
human spirit, conscious of its infinite capacity for all
these things, but * cabined, cribbed, confined ' within the
dungeon of insuperable limitations — this purchase at
the price of infinite agony and never-ending remorse,
is a tragedy of aspiration, insubordination, and ultimate
acceptance of inevitable doom, which has for its dim
background the sublimely sombre religion of the Eddas.

While the Germans were writing down their Faustiad

no casual biography of a conjuror, but the allegory of
a whole past epoch of intellectual somnambulism,
visited with fiery dreams — the Italians had already
wrought by art, by humanism, by the energies of a
diversified and highly coloured social life, deliverance
for Europe. It was not their mission to enact or to
compose the Faustiad — for this they had not then the
requisite gifts of courage or imagination, of mental grasp
upon the dreadfulness of existence or of passionate in-
surgence against its stem fatalities — but to contrive

MARLOWE'S 'DOCTOR FAUSTUS: \

the conditions of thought and culture under.
Faustus might wed the real Helen of resuscitatu. •_.
and letters, might deliver his soul from hell, and satisfy
his thirst for power and knowledge by science.

The Faustiad precedes the Renaissance, and be-
longs to a superseded past. Yet, like the legends of
Don Juan and Tannhauser, it became the property of
succeeding ages, because it expressed with mythic
largeness a real experience of humanity. The tragic
conflicts of the soul set forth in these three legends
lend themselves to modern interpretation, to the art of
Goethe, Mozart, and Wagner. Marlowe, acting the
part which poets have so often played in preserving
the very form and pressure of the times in which they
lived, invested one sombre and grotesque product of the
Middle Ages with the imaginative splendour of the
Renaissance. At first sight it might appear that he
was satisfied with arranging the German text-book in
scenes ; so closely has he adhered to his original, so
carelessly has he dramatised the uncouth drolleries
and childish diableries with which it is enlivened. His
tragedy is without a plot, without a female character.
It is not even divided into acts ; and the scenes, with
the exception of the first three and the last two, might
be transposed without material injury to the plan. Yet
the closer we inspect it, and the more we study it, the
better shall we learn that he has given a great and
tragic unity to his drama, that he has succeeded in
drawing a modern work of art from the chaotic
medieval matter. This unity is Faustus in his pro-
tracted vacillation between right and wrong, his con-
flict between curiosity and conscience, * Doctor

SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Faustus ' IS more nearly allied in form to the dramatic
poems of our own days, which present a psychological
study of character to the reader, than any other work
of our old theatre. Marlowe concentrated his energies
on the delineation of the proud life and terrible death
of a man in revolt against the eternal laws of his own
nature and the world, defiant and desperate, plagued
with remorse, alternating between the gratification of
his appetites and the dread of a God whom he rejects
without denying. It is this tragic figure which he
drew forth from the substance of the German tale, and
endowed with the breath and blood of real existence.
He traced the outline with a breadth and dignity beyond
the scope of the prose legend. He filled it in with the
power of a great poet, with the intensity of life belong-
ing to himself and to the age of adolescent vigour.
He left us a picture of the medieval rebel, true in its
minutest details to that bygone age, but animated with
his own audacious spirit, no longer mythical, but
vivified, a living personality. By the side of Faustus
he placed the sinister and melancholy Mephistophilis,
a spirit who wins souls for hell by the allurements of
despair, playing with open cards and hiding no iota of
the dreadfulness of damnation. He introduced good
and bad angels, hovering in the air, and whispering
alternately their words of warning and enticement in
the ears of Faustus. The professional magicians who
lend their books to the hero, the old man who entreats
him to repent, the scholars who assuage his last hours
with their sympathy, make up the minor persons of
the drama. But each and all of these subordinate cha-
racters are dedicated to the one main purpose of express-

SOMBRE TONE OF THIS PLAY, 633

ing the psychological condition of Faustus from various
points of view : — the perplexities of his divided spirit,
his waverings of anguish and remorse, the flickerings
of hope extinguished in the smoke of self-abandon-
ment to fear, the pungent pricks of conscience soothed
by transient visions of delight, the prying curiosity
which lulls his torment at one moment, the soul's
defiance yielding to despair, and from despair re-
covering fresh strength to sin and suffer. To this
vivisection of a ruined man, all details in the gloomy
scene contribute. Even the pitiful distractions —
pitiful in their leaden dulness and blunt edge of
drollery — with which Faustus amuses his worse than
Promethean leisure until the last hour of his contract
sound, heighten the infernal effect. The stage swarms
continually with devils, running at one time at their
masters bidding on the sorriest errands, evoking at
another the most dismal shows from hell. We are
entertained with processions of the Seven Deadly Sins,
and with masques of the damned * in that vast perpetual
torture-house' below. In the absence of the hero,
Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistophilis commune to-
gether with gross irony. The whole theatre is sul-
phurous with fumes of the bottomless pit Through
the smoke and stench thereof there flashes once a
Woman-Devil —

Beautiful
As was bright Lucifer before his fall ;

but her kisses are hot as * sops of flaming fire : ' and
once again there glides the fair ghost of Helen in a
vision ; ineffectual as feasts of Tantalus.

Marlowe's Faustus is a Teutonic and a medieval

634 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

sceptic. There is nothing light or Latin in his atti-
tude ; no carelessness or banter, no irony, no willing-
ness to sneer away the ruin of his soul in epigrams.
He personifies disbelief as disbelief then was ; con-
vinced of a supernatural environment of spiritual
realities ; surrounded by the terrors of a ghostly world.
The Florentine indifference of Machiavelli, absorbed in
actualities of human life ; the Venetian indifference
of Aretino, besotted with Greek wine and wanton
cynicism ; the modern indifference of free-thinkers,
who have divested their minds of God and devil,
heaven and hell ; were all alike alien to his nature.
Faustus doubts, indeed, whether there be a hell —
confounds this in his bolder moments with Elysium.
Yet he sells himself, soul and body, by a formal
bond, signed with the blood of his own veins, to
Lucifer ; and the first questions he addresses to his
familiar, concern the state of fallen spirits. His
atheism has a background of terror thinly veiled by
the mind's inquisitiveness. He is the sceptic of an
age of nightmares ; and though these only come at
intervals, they recur with fearful and accelerated force
as time advances. Faustus risks the future for the
sake of novel experience and present power. Discon-
tented with the known results of former speculations,
wearied with the stale sic probo of the schools, he
flings himself into the deviFs arms. This fatigue of
current knowledge, this attempt to transcend its tedious
limitations by a compact with the fiend, was only
possible in a theological, unscientific age. Modem
scepticism is both more subtle and less passionate.
The Faustus of our moment doubts all things ; but be-

FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. 635

lieves that if there be a God, He will be merciful.
Irritated perhaps by the slow advance of science, he is
yet aware that power and knowledge cannot be acquired
by magic. If there is no God, there is no devil to help
him out of his inaction. He is flung back on a tide-
less sea of stagnation, listlessness, and trivial pleasures.
The case was far different with the men of Mar-
lowe's age. The world-old identification of man's
thirst for power and knowledge with rebellion still
oppressed their spirits. The forbidden tree of Paradise
still stretched its ominous branches across their heaven.
The story of Faustus is, in this light, another version
of the Fall. How the belief that knowledge was pro-
hibited by God to man first became a part and parcel
of the human conscience, defeats investigation. This
belief is one of the direst evils with which religion has
tormented the blind, groping spirit of our race. Man,
surrounded by insoluble mysteries, seeks to fathom
them. Possessed with the idea that inquiry is impious,
he pursues it with unholy ardour. The height and
depth, the strength and weakness of his being inter-
penetrate : conscious of finite power and infinite
capacity, he mistakes the limitations of the present
for eternal laws. Hence spring the figments of jealous
deities, of secrets which it is a crime to fathom.
Prometheus is chained on Caucasus for bringing fire
from heaven ; Ulysses roasts in hell because he set his
sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules ; Roger Bacon is
consigned to perdition for studying chemistry. The
first astronomers, the first navigators, the first anato-
mists, are shunned and imprisoned like maniacs, if
they escape burning as atheists.

636 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Faustus is the hero and the martyr of forbidden
knowledge. The knowledge he sought was by hypo-
thesis unholy, and the means he took to acquire it
were unlawful. It was not science, as we understand
it, or as the world even then understood it, that he
pursued, but thaumaturgy, after which a mind, wearied
with scepticism, is wont to hanker. Having exhausted
the learning of his age, impotent to carry it any
further, fatigued with the reiteration of its formulas, he
loses hold on life and on the truth. Logic, physic,
law, theolog>', each presents him with a crazy doubt
He has turned each to poison by refusing to exercise
them within the sphere of practice. What remains ?
Nothing but the vast external void, which his o\vn
doubts and questions fill like fiends and phantoms.
Nothing but the spirit-shaking, all-absorbing appetite
for that which lies behind the veil. * Where the Gods
are not, ghosts abound.' This saying is true of the
distempered, ennui-haunted soul. In this region
Faustus wanders, half misdoubting, half creating the
spectres which throng round him, but gradually waking
to discover that they have awful counterparts in the
real world.

It seemed, no doubt, right to the men of that cen-
tury, ready as they were to burn each other for points
of doctrine, that Lucifer should exact his bond and
Faustus be damned. At the same time, their own
strong passions responded to his arrogant intrepidity.
Face to face with hell, convinced of its reality by the
fiend whom he evoked, Faustus plunged into the abyss,
partly from curiosity, partly from the lust of power
and pleasure, partly blinded by the fate which over-

NOBILITY OF FAUSTUS" SIN, 637

takes aspirants against God. This was a picture to
fascinate men passing from the torpor of the past into
the activity of the Renaissance, remembering those
nightmares, but feeling in their veins the blood of a
new epoch. They hailed Faustus as a hero, but they
acquiesced in his doom ; they had as yet no thought
of sneering away God and hell. They would as soon
have cared to rescue a pirate from the gallows as to
waste pity upon Faustus. Yet Faustus had in him
the passion of that spirit which discovered America,
which circumnavigated the globe, which revealed the
planetary system, which overthrew the tyranny of
Rome. What makes Faustus a tragic personage is
that the passion of this noble spirit in him was per-
verted. What constitutes the claim of Marlowe to
the fame of a great tragic poet in this creation, is the
firmness with which he has traced the indelible and
everlasting signs of a damned conscience in this not
ignoble character. Sin and the symptoms of sin, the
soul's sin against the Holy Ghost, its agony and its
ruin, are depicted for us with a force which preachers
and divines might envy.

At the opening of the play Faustus is discovered
in his study, taking stock of his acquirements, and
reflecting on the course he should adopt in future.
The very first words he speaks reveal a rebellious

spirit :

Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin

To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess :

Having commenced, be a divine in show.

Yet level at the end of every art,

And live and die in Aristotle's works.

Shall he addict himself, then, wholly to philosophy .^

638 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

What is the end of logic ? * To dispute well — bene
disserere ! ' That will not suffice. Pass physic in
review. He has exhausted the wisdom of Galen and
applied it to such good purpose that the world rings
with the report of his cures :

Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.

The secret of his sin is peeping out. Faustus,
'glutted with learning's golden gifts/ would fain be
more than man. He now takes up Justinian, and
turns the leaves :

This study fits a mercenary drudge,
Who aims at nothing but external trash ;
Too servile and illiteral for me.

Theology remains. He pulls the Vulgate from the
shelf and opens it. StipendUim peccati mors est. Si
peccasse negamtcs, fallimtir. * The reward of sin is
death. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves : '

Ay, we must die an everlasting death !
What doctrine call you this, Clu sard^ sard.
What will be, shall be ?

Divinity drives him into fatalism, for he forgets the
sacrifice of Christ. All this while his fingers have been
itching for the books of magic, which remain upon the
shelf; and now he clasps them with something of the
miser s clutch on gold :

These metaphysics of magicians

And necromantic books arc heavenly ! . . .

Oh, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, and omnipotence.

Is promised to the studious artisan !

All things that move between the quiet poles

MEPHiSTOPHIUS APPEARS. 639

Shall be at my command ; emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces ;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.

The die is cast Power, limitless as the mind, raising
man to godhood, is the lure to which the soul of Faustus
stoops. He sends for Valdes and Cornelius, professed
magicians, to aid him in his studies ; and, while he waits
for them, the good and bad angels, who dramatically
objectify the double impulses of appetite and conscience,
whisper in his ear, the one dissuading, the other en-
couraging his resolution.

Valdes and Cornelius inflame Faustus' fancy fur-
ther with the splendid pictures of material pomp and
sensual delights they paint; and having lent him
books and instruments of the black art, instruct him
how to use them at the proper moment When night
comes he seeks a solitary wood, and raises Mephis -
tophilis, who first appears under the form of a mon-
strous dragon :

I charge thee to return, and change thy shape !
Thou art too ugly to attend on me.
Go, and return an old Franciscan friar ;
That holy shaj^e becomes a devil best

The ready compliance of this black seraph inflates the
vanity of Faustus, and confirms him in his resolution.
When the diabolical friar enters, there begins that
darkest colloquy, whereby Marlowe seems bent on
proving that the powers of evil need no Jesuitry to
entice a blinded soul. The magician haughtily com-
mands the service of his vassal. The fiend answers
he is ' servant to great Lucifer.' Faustus submits that

640 SIfAKSPERE'S PREDECESSOH^S.

his conjuring had brought him hither ; Mephistophilis
replies :

That was the cause, but yet per accidens ;

For when we hear one rack the name of Ckxi,

Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,

We fly in hoi)e to get his glorious soul ;

Nor will we come, unless he use such means

Whereby he is in danger to be damned.

Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring

Is stoutly to abj ure all godliness,

And pray devoutly to the prince of hell.

Enough surely to make Faustus shrink upon the verge
of perdition ! But he is so ravished with his owr
conceit, that he cries :

This word damnation terrifies not me ;

For I confound hell in Elysium ;

My ghost be with the old philosophers !

Then, as though to give his soul another chance, but
really in order to satisfy a craving curiosity, he asks
again :

But, leaving these vain trifles of men's souls,
Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord ?

The dialogue which follows must be transcribed at
length, not only for its own impressive dignity and
beauty, but also for the light it casts on Marlowe's
dramatic conception of a sin-blind soul, gazing on the
anguish of the damned, and yet persisting in its own
desire :

Faust, Tell mc what is that Lucifer thy lord ?
Mcph, Arch-regent and Commander of all spirits.
Faust Was not that Lucifer an angel once ?
Meph, Ves, Faustus, and most dearly lov'd of God.
Faust, How comes it, then, that he is prince of devils ?
Meph, O, by aspiring pride and insolence ;
For which God threw him from the face of heaven.
Faust, And what are you that live with Lucifer ?

FA us 7^ us SELLS HIS SOUL 641

Meph, Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspired against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damn'd with Lucifer.

Faust, Where are you damn'd ?

Mep/i, In hell.

Faust How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell ?

Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it ;
Think'st thou that I, that saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven.
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss ?
O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul !

The fiend's visible torment only draws this taunt from
Faustus :

What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
For being dei)riv^d of the joys of heaven ?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess.

Then he bids him bear a message back to Lucifer,
stipulating for the purchase of his soul, already damned
by traffic in forbidden things :

So he will spare him four and twenty years.
Letting him live in all voluptuousness.

He bargains for the unconditional service of Mephis-
tophilis through this space of time ; and having sent
the devil on his errand, sighs his heart s wish out in
two imperishable lines :

Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I 'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

Upon cold reflection, conscience resumes her sway for
a moment. Faustus soliloquises in his study : ^

^ Choosing between the texts of quartos 1604 and 1616, I should like
to emend the opening sentence thus :

Now, Faustus,
Must thou, needs be, be damned, canst not be saved.

r T

642 SHAfCSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

Now, Faustus, must
Thou needs be damned, and canst thou not be saved.
What boots it, then, to think on God or heaven ?
Away with such vain fancies, and despair ;
Despair in God, and trust in Belzebub.
Now go not back, Faustus ; be resolute !
Why waverest thou ? O, something soundeth in mine ear,
* Abjure this magic, turn to God again ! '
Why he loves thee not ;
The god thou serv st is thine own appetite.
Wherein is fixed the love of Belzebub.

The two voices of the good and evil angels whisper
once more in his ears ; and while he is arguing with
the one and leaning to the other, Mephistophilis re-
enters, the bond is written with the blood of Faustus,
and the compact is accomplished. The first question
Faustus asks, after he has sold himself to Lucifer,
concerns the state of hell. Where, to begin with, is
the place of torment }

Meph. Within the bowels of these elements,
\Vhere we are tortur'd and remain for ever :
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self-place ; but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be ;
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified.
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Faust I think hell 's a fable.

Meph, Ay, think so still, till exfierience change thy mind.

Faust, ^Vhy dost thou think that Faustus shall be damn'd ?

Meph, Ay, of necessity, for here 's the scroll
In which thou hast given thy soul to Lucifer.

Faust Ay, and body too ; and what of that ?
Think'st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine
That after this life, there is any pain ?
No, these are trifles, and mere old wives' tales.

Meph, But I am an instance to prove the contrary.
For I tell thee I am damn'd and now in hell.

Faust, Nay, an this be hell, I'll willingly be damn'd :
What ! sleeping, eating, walking and disputing !

THE DEBATE ON HELL. 643

Only one scene known to me in modern poetry offers
any parallel to these weird dialogues between the fiend
and Faustus. That is, the conversation which Mala-
gigi holds with Astarotte in * The Morgante Maggiore/
But Pulci is not, like Marlowe, in earnest. The
Italian magician has not compromised his soul ; and
the discourse glides gracefully from painful topics into
a strain of courteous persiflage. Far more captivating
to the imagination than Astarotte is this melancholy
figure of Mephistophilis, the fallen angel, the servant
of the Lord of Hell, standing at midnight in the doctor s
study, dressed like a brown Capuchin, and resolving
doleful problems of damnation with sinister sincerity.
Marlowe's dramatic instinct drew advantage from the
fiend's uncompromising candour. He used it to
heighten the intrepidity of Faustus, to deepen the
picture of the doomed man's spiritual arrogance.

Faustus makes ample use of his dearly purchased
power. He surfeits his sense with carnal pleasure, and
gluts his appetite for knowledge. Homer sings and
Amphion plays to him. He forces Mephistophilis to
answer questions in astronomy and cosmography ; flies
in a chariot ^drawn by dragons round about the world ;
pries upon the planets, and surveys the kingdoms of
the earth. Yet, when he is left alone, the snakes of
conscience wake, and the two voices keep buzzing in
his ear. The good angel grows faint ; the evil threatens.
He has reached a critical point, where he begins to
regret the past : the hours of agony are frequent, and
he groans aloud :

My heart is hardened ; I cannot repent ;
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven :

T r 2

644 shAksper^'S pred£:l£:ssors.

Swords, poisons, halters, and envenomed steel.
Are laid before me to despatch myself ;
And long ere this should I have done the deed,
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.

Even his familiar mocks him, bidding him muse on
Hell, since he is damned. He listens for one moment
to the better voice. Alone upon the silent stage, in
the darkness, he thrice invokes the holy name :

O Christ, my Saviour, my Saviour I
Help to save distressed Faustus' soul !

Then suddenly emerges Lucifer with all his train :

Christ cannot save thy soul ; for He is just :
There *s none but I have interest in the same.

Thus a devil speaks the naked truth to Faustus, who
perforce must cringe before him, slinking back into
obedience. Immediately afterwards he is fantastically
soothed with nothing more attractive than a masque of
the Seven Deadly Sins. The doomed man's only
thought now is to spend the rest of his short years in
a variety of fresh enjoyments. He travels far and
wide ; performs apish tricks in the Vatican, raises
ghosts before the Emperor, plays practical jokes on
clowns. In this wild whirligig of change the horror of
damnation seizes him :

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die ?
Thy fatal time draws to a final end.

It is this ever-recurring cry of the damned, growing
more acute as the end approaches, which makes even
the buffooneries of Doctor Faustus terrible. As the
years move on this horror of the end increases. In a
scene of very great, because sober, tragic power^

HORROR OF DAMNATION, 645

Marlowe gives the victim one last chance. An old
man enters, and reminds Faustus that there is still
room for repentance :

Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul,
If sin by custom grow not into nature.

Hope seems ready to leap up in the withered heart ;
but Mephistophilis is at his victim's elbow, with a
dagger, the symbol of despair :

Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul
For disobedience to my sovereign lord ;
Revolt, or I ^11 in piecemeal tear thy flesh.

Faustus knows too well that the obsequious fiend, his
servant, is a tyrannous master ; for verily

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

It only remains to plunge again into forbidden bliss,
and, as a crowning pleasure, Faustus demands Helen
for his paramour.

The last scene is introduced by a dialogue of calm
simplicity and quiet dignity between Faustus and his
former pupils. The tender solicitude of these scholars,
their love for their old master, their respect for his attain-
ments, the sympathy with which they strive in vain to
stanch the wound of his spirit at this final hour, shed a
soft gleam of natural light upon the otherwise unmiti-
gated gloom of the tragedy. One of them would fain
abide the issue of the night in company with Faustus.
* God will strengthen me,' he says ; * I will stay with
Faustus.' But the wretched man, divining what must
happen, cannot permit this sacrifice ; and the scholars
retire into the adjoining room to pray for him. Faustus

646 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

IS now alone, alone with spiritual beings — with jeering
and exultant Mephistophilis, and with the angels ; the
good angel, who shows the celestial throne on which
he might have sat and * triumphed over Hell ; ' the bad
angel, who reveals the * ever-burning chair ' on which

* o*er-tortured souls ' may rest. As throughout the
play, these angels are but Faustus own thoughts ob-
jectified ; and the contrasted thrones they now display
are things of his imagination, rendered visible to the
spectators.

The last hour of the hero s life unrolls itself slowly
in one powerful soliloquy. The minutes are counted
by sand-grains of his agony :

O Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually !

Starting from this contemplation, he calls upon the

* ever-moving spheres of heaven ' to stand, or for the
sun to rise * and make perpetual day ; ' or for this houi
to be

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

Then, by an exquisite touch of nature — the brain
involuntarily summoning words employed for othej
purposes in happier hours — he cries aloud the line
which Ovid whispered in Corinna s arms :

O lente, Icnte currite, noctis equi !

But the heavens in their cycles will not be stopped to
save one sinner s soul :

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

LAST HOURS OF FAUSTUS, 647

We seem to see him at his study window, with the
night of stars above, and not a voice or footstep in
the streets of Wittenberg respondent to his agony. As
he leans forth to the darkness, cannot wings be given
to his spirit's wish ? —

O, 1 11 leap up to heaven ! — who pulls mc do^Ti ? —
See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament !
One drop of blood will save me ; O my Christ ! —
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ ;
Yet will I call on him ; O, spare me, Lucifer !

The heated eye of his despair beholds the galaxy itself
turned into a river of red flowing blood, far, far beyond
his reach ; and though we do not see the devil, we feel
him wrestling with his soul, forbidding, mastering him.
Horrid visions of ' a threatening arm, an angry brow,'
distract his mind. He calls upon the mountains and
the hills to fall on him. Earth * will not harbour him.'
The * stars that reigned at his nativity ' are deaf to his
ientreaty. While he is thus struggling in the toils of
vain desire, the half-hour strikes. This rouses a new
train of thought :

O, if my soul must suffer for my sin,
Impose some end to my incessant pain ;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be saved !

But, no, the soul is everlasting, and damnation has no
limit :

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul ?

This reminds him of Pythagorean metempsychosis, and
he falls to envying the revolutions of imbruted spirits.
There is something maddening in the pressure of the
thought of immortality upon a soul, whose endless

648 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

plagues not even suicide can lighten. Nothing is left
but curses. Cursing his parents, his birth, himself, and
Lucifer, the clock strikes twelve, the devils rush with
thunder on the stage, and Faustus is dragged down to
hell.

Marlowe, it will be seen, spared his audience no
iota either of the spiritual or the physical torment of
his hero. Would it not have been more magnificent,
we are inclined to wonder, if he could have shown us
Faustus in revolt against the devil also at the end —
like Dante's Farinata, holding hell in great disdain —
or like Mozart's Don Juan, who, while the marble
grasp of the Commendatore stiffens round his fingers,
answers to the oft-repeated Pentiti a stubborn No ?
This indeed he might have done, and done with terrible
effect, if the conscience of the public and the age would
have permitted it So far as we know anything at all
about Marlowe, we have some right to assume that he
had himself adopted the rebellious attitude of Faustus.
In depicting his end thus, with force so penetrative o<
imagination, did he mean to paint the terrors of his
own remorseful soul ; or, with an artist's irony, did he
sacrifice the finest point of the situation to conventions
and the exigencies of accepted beliefs ? This we
cannot now decide. But the whole handling by
Marlowe of the Faust-legend inclines one rather to
believe that, if it is in any true sense autobiographical,
the poet was but an ill-contented and heart- sick
atheist.

The Epilogue spoken by the Chorus points the
moral of the tragedy in noble lines, three of which
supply an epitaph for Marlowe's grave :

* THE JEW OF MALTA: 649

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And bumfed is Apollo's laurel-bough,

That sometime grew within this learned man.

Faustus is gone : — regard his hellish fall,

Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,

Only to wonder at unlawful things,

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To practise more than heavenly power permits.

Possibly Marlowe reckoned that, not having dabbled
in black arts, nor having signed a compact with his
blood, he would escape damnation. Possibly he was
an atheist so complete, and an artist so consummate,
as to be able to smile at the Acheron he luridly made
visible to mortal eyes.

IX.

I have said much already about the character of
Barabas, in * The Jew of Malta.' It is clear that
Marlowe yielded to the traditions of the Miracles
when he put this Jew upon the stage, out- H eroding
Herod in his fury. But it is also clear that he sketched
the prototype of Shylock. Barabas, down-trodden,
kicked into corners, and despoiled by the Christians,
retains the Hebrew pride of race :

In spite ot these swine-eating Christians —

Unchosen nation, never circumcised.

Poor villains, such as were ne*er thought upon.

Till Titus and Vespasian conquered us —

Am I become as wealthy as I was.

I am not of the tribe of Levi, I,

That can so soon forget an injury.

We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please ;

And when we grin we bite : yet are our looks

As innocent and harmless as a lamb's.

650 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

I leam'd in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any barefoot friar ;
Hoping to see them starve upon a stall.
Or else be gathered for in our synagogue,
That, when the offering basin comes to me,
Even for charity I may spit into 't.

A Christian, the lover of his daughter, greets him in
the street with : ' Whither walk'st thou, Barabas ? '
He answers :

No further : 't is a custom held with us.
That when we speak with Gentiles like to you.
We turn into the air to purge ourselves ;
For unto us the promise doth belong.

This arrogance of race and religion is fortified by
the comparison between his people and the Christian
hypocrites who persecute them :

Thus trolls our fortune in by land and sea.
And thus are we on every side enrich'd :
These are the blessings promised to the Jews,
And herein was old Abraham's happiness :
What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps.
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them.
Making the seas their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts ?
Who hateth me but for my happiness ?
Or who is honoured now but for his wealth ?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus
Than pitied in a Christian poverty ;
For I can see no fruits in all their faith.
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride.
Which, methinks, fits not their profession.
Haply some hapless man hath conscience,
And for his conscience lives in beggary.
They say we are a scattered nation ;
I cannot tell ; but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.

BAR ABAS AND SHYLOCK, 651

There's Kirriah Jairim, the great Jew of Greece,
Obed in Bairseth, Nones in Portugal,
Myself in Malta, some in Italy,
Many in France, and wealthy every one ;
Ay, wealthier far than any Christian.

Up to this point Barabas is not unworthy of Shy-
lock. But it would be a waste of labour to prolong
the comparison of two pictures so differently executed.
The one is a powerful but rough draft. The other is
a finely finished portrait Shylock disappears together
with the storm and passion he has stirred. And round
him Shakspere grouped some of our dearest friends —
noble Bassanio, devoted Antonio, witty Gratiano, the
dignity of Portia, the tenderness of Jessica, the merri-
ment of Nerissa. These remain ; and over them, at
last, is shed an atmosphere of peace and music in that
moonlight act, the loveliest Shakspere ever wrote. Its
beauty never dies. Jessica still sits upon the bank,
and Lorenzo whispers to her of * the young-eyed
cherubin/ We hear the voices of Portia and Nerissa
coming through the twilight of the garden. The
music, sweeter by night than day, still lingers in our
ears. The lovers' quarrel, so artfully contrived and
so delightfully concluded, still enchants our sympathy.
How different is the impression left by Marlowe's
play ! Round the . wolf-fanged figure of Barabas
gathers a rout of grasping tyrants and vindictive
pariahs, hypocritical friars and cut-throat slaves, the
rapacious Bellamira, the hideous Ithamore, the ruffian
Pilia Borza. It is as though Marlowe, in pure wan-
tonness of cynicism, had planned the vilest scheme of
villany, debauchery, greed, treason, homicide, con-
cupiscence, infernal cruelty ; raking the dregs and

652 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

ransacking the dunghills of humanity to justify the
melodrama of his hero s cursing end.

The unrelieved cruelty of this play encourages a
belief that Marlowe dramatised it from some Spanish
novel ; and there is one scene which, in its unconscious
humour, grotesque and ghastly, forcibly reminds us
of Spanish art. Barabas has been detected in one of
his rogueries by two friars belonging to different re-
ligious bodies. In order to extricate himself and to
involve them both in ruin, he determines to work
upon their common avarice and mutual jealousy. He
begins by pretending repentance, and dazzling their
imaginations with a picture of his wealth :

Bara. O holy friars, the burden of my sins
Lies heavy on my soul ! then, pray you, tell me.
Is *t not too late now to turn Christian ?
I have been zealous in the Jewish faith,
Hard-hearted to the poor, a covetous wretch,
That would for lucre's sake have sold my soul ;
A hundred for a hundred I have ta'en ;
And now for store of wealth may I compare
With all the Jews in Malta ; but what is wealth ?
I am a Jew, and therefore am I lost.
Would penance serve [to atone] for this my sin,
I could afford to whip myself to death.

Itha, And so could I ; but penance will not serve.

Bara» To fast, to pray, and wear a shirt of hair.
And on my knees creep to Jerusalem.
Cellars of wine, and sollars full of wheat,
Warehouses stuffd with spices and with drugs.
Whole chests of gold in bullion and in coin,
Besides, I know not how much weight in i^earl,
Orient and round, have I within my house ;
At Alexandria merchandise untold ;
But yesterday two ships went from this town,
Their voyage will be worth ten thousand crowns ;
In Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London, Seville,
Frankfort, Lubeck, Moscow, and where not,

BARABAS AND THE FRIARS. 653

Have I debts owing ; and, in most of these,
Great sums of money lying in the banco ;
All this I 'II give to some religious house,
So I may be baptised, and live therein.

Friar Jacopo and Friar Barnardine immediately fall
to bidding one against the other for this desirable
penitent. Each in turn depreciates his rivals order,
and exalts the merits of his own. Barabas stimulates
their several cupidities. At last the friars come to
blows. He then assumes the character of peacemaker,
cajoling Friar Barnardine to stay in his own house,
and making an appointment with Friar Jacopo for the
following night. Barnardine, as might have been
expected, is strangled in the meanwhile by the Jew
and his accomplice Ithamore. They prop him up
upon his staff in a doorway, through which the other
friar will have to pass. *So, let him lean upon his
staff,' grins Ithamore; 'excellent! he stands as if he
were begging of bacon.' Jacopo, in haste to keep his
appointment with the wealthy convert, soon appears,
and by the dim light of the moon detects his rival in
the archway. At first he speaks him fair ; then,
getting no answer and spying the staff, he thinks an
ambush has been laid for him, and knocks the body
down. Barabas rushes from the house, lifts the corpse,
and accuses Jacopo of the murder. There lies dead
Barnardine, and over him is stretched the tell-tale staff.
Barabas, with brutal sarcasm, exclaims :

For this example I '11 remain a Jew :

Heaven bless me ! What, a friar, a murderer !

When shall you see a Jew commit the like?

Then he drags Jacopo off to justice, with Ithamore for
witness and the staff for evidence.

654 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

It is not easy to calculate the acting capabilities of
plays. Tamburlaine in his * copper-laced coat and
crimson velvet breeches/ and Barabas with his huge
red nose, were no less popular upon the stage than
Faustus in his * cloak and jerkin/ The great actor,
Edward Alleyn, gained applause, we know, in all these
characters, * and won the attribute of peerless/ Richard
Perkins, who sustained the weight of Webster's Bra-
chiano, was also famous for his personation of the Jew.
To students the distance between Faustus and Barabas,
considered from the point of view of psychological
analysis, is immense. But it is conceivable that the
bustle, bloodshed, and continual business of * The Jew
of Malta ' may have made this drama more attractive
than the other. Hey wood, in a prologue written for
the Court about the year 1633, describes it as :

Writ many years agone.
And in that age thought second unto none.

Modern criticism will place * The Jew of Malta* below
the fourth of Marlowe's tragedies. This is the * Chronicle
of Edward II.,' upon which Shakspere modelled his
Richard II., and which, in my opinion, offers points of
superiority to the first of the Shaksperian history-plays.
That species of dramatic skill which consists in pro-
tracting a tragic situation by fixing attention on the
gradual consummation of a fate involved in the folly of
the protagonist, by harassing our feelings with renewed
demands upon their sympathy, and by showing the
victim of his own insolence more noble in misfortune

'EDWARD Ii: 655

than when he sunned his wilfulness in noonday pride,
has been brilliantly displayed by Marlowe in Edward II.
Putting Shakspere s studies from the English chronicles
out of account, this is certainly the finest historical
drama in our language, as it also is the first deserving
of that title.

In the three tragedies by Marlowe which have been
hitherto examined one personage predominates ; the
rest are mainly accessory to the action. * Tamburlaine,'
* Doctor Faustus,' and *The Jew of Malta' exist for and
in their eponymous heroes. * Edward 11/ exhibits three
characters of almost equal power in conflict and con-
trast ; these are Edward, Gaveston, and Mortimer —
the king, besotted by his doting fondness for a minion ;
the favourite ckitching at power and place, using his
base influence for a realm's ruin ; the ambitious subject
climbing to a crown by trading on the general hatred for
this upstart, no less than on the queen's wounded sense
of self-respect Round these leading personages are
grouped temporal and spiritual barons of a feudal
epoch, bound to the throne by allegiance, but conscious of
their power as vassals of the Crown or representatives
of Rome — stung to rebellion by the foolishness of an
unkingly king. The dialogue, in its brief, hot vehe-
mence, suits these turbulent passions. For the first
time in a play of this description steel grates on steel
and blow responds to blow, in the quick, tense speech
of natural anger. The king and his minion, the
insulted queen, the haughty bishop, the wrathful lords,
the bold ambitious paramour, and the hired assassin
clash together through successive scenes of strife and
intrigue, in which a kingdom is twice lost and won,

r,56 SI/AKsrERK'S PREDECESSORS.

and lost again. How largely it is all planned ! not
deftly plotted, but traced upon the lines of history in
bold and vivid characters.

The openings of Marlowe's plays are always fine,
and this of * Edward II.* is no exception. Gaveston
appears upon the scene ; and after some preliminary
dialogue, which serves to accentuate the minion's cha-
racter, he breaks into this soliloquy :

These are not men for me.
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.
Music and poetry is his delight.
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows ;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad.
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay ;
Sometimes a lovely boy in Dianas shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearls about his naked arms.
And in his s])ortful hands an olive tree.
Shall bathe him in a spring ; and there, hard by.
One like Actaion, peeping through the grove.
Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,
And running in the likeness of an hart.
By yeljMng hounds pulled down, shall seem to die :
Such things as these best please his majesty.

This monologue of Gaveston's, underlined as it is by
the last verse, indicates, as in a frontispiece, the motive
of the drama. Afterwards it remains to see how
Edward flings away wife, crown, and people's love for
the idle pleasures promised him by Gaveston.

There are two passages in 'Edward II.' where
Marlowe rises to sublime poetic pitch. The one deals

EDWARD IN THE ABBEY, 657

with what Lamb called * the reluctant pangs of abdi-
cating royalty ; ' the other is that death scene, which,
in the words of the same critic, * moves pity and terror
beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am
acquainted/ The poet undertook no facile task when
he essayed to show the light, lascivious Edward digni-
fied in suffering. Yet this he has accomplished by the
passionate rhetoric and thrilling verse with which he
has enforced the tragic pathos of royalty eclipsed,
exposed to outrage, menaced with murder. For awhile,
before his fall, Edward, in the company of his friends
Spencer and Baldock, takes refuge with the monks of
Neath. The abbot receives the disguised fugitives :

Abbot. Have you no doubt, my lord ; have you no fear :
As silent and as careful we will be
To keep your royal person safe with us,
Free from suspect, and fell invasion
Of such as have your majesty in chase.
Yourself, and those your chosen company,
As danger of this stormy time requires.

K. Edw. Father, thy face should harbour no deceit.
O, hadst thou ever been a king, thy heart,
Pierc'd deeply with sense of my distress.
Could not but take compassion of my state !
Stately and proud in riches and in train,
Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp ;
But what is he whom rule and empery
Have not in life or death made miserable ?

Then the king turns to his companions :

Come, Spenser — come, Baldock — come, sit down by me

Make trial now of that philosophy

That in our famous nurseries of arts

Thou suck'dst from Plato and from Aristotle.

Father, this life contemplative is heaven ;

O, that I might this life in quiet lead !

U U

658 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS,

One of them lets fall the name of Mortimer :

Mortimer ! who talks of Mortimer ?

Who wounds me with the name of Mortimer,

That bloody man ? — Good father, on thy lap

Lay I this head, laden with mickle care.

O might I never ope these eyes again,

Never again lift up this drooping head,

O, never more lift up this dying heart !

This scene serves as prelude to the abdication scene at
Killingworth. The Earl of Leicester and the Bishop
of Winchester are in attendance, the one soothing the
king s anguish with kind words ; the other stubbornly
insisting on his resignation of the crown. Edward
opens the debate in a speech of harmony so rich and
varied, that in this I recognise the master s perfected
command of his own mighty line :

Leicester, if gentle words might comfort me,
Thy speeches long ago had eas*d my sorrow.
For kind and loving hast thou always been.
The griefs of private men are soon allay'd ;
But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,
Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds ;
But when the imperial lion's flesh is gor*d.
He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw,
[And], highly scorning that the lowly earth
Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air ;
And so it fares with me, whose dauntless mind
Th' ambitiotis Mortimer would seek to curb,
And that unnatural cjueen, false Isabel,
That thus hath pent and mew'd me in a prison ;
For such outrageous passions clog my soul,
As with the wings of rancour and disdain
Full oft[en] am I soaring up to heaven.
To plain me to the gods against them both.
But when I call to mind I am a king,
Methinks I should revenge me of my wrongs
That Mortimer and Isabel have done.
But what are kings, when regiment is gone.

EDWARD AT KILLINGWORTH, 659

But perfect shadows in a sunshine day ?
My nobles rule ; I bear the name of king ;
I wear the crown ; but am controlled by them,
By Mortimer, and my unconstant queen.
Who spots my nuptial bed with infamy ;
Whilst I am lodg'd within this cave of care, •
Where Sorrow at my elbow still attends.
To company my heart with sad laments,
That bleeds within me for this strange exchange.

The Bishop submits that Edward will resign his
crown to his own son, and not to Mortimer. * No,* he
replies :

No, 't is for Mortimer, not Edward's head ;
For he 's a lamb, encompassed by wolves.
Which in a moment will abridge his life.
But if proud Mortimer do wear this crown.
Heaven turn it to a blaze of quenchless fire !
Or, like the snaky wreath of Tisiphon,
Engirt the temples of his hateful head ;
So shall not England's vine be perished.
But Edward's name survive though Edward dies.

Both Leicester and the Bishop urge. Edward vacil-
lates between necessity and shame. At one moment
he takes the crown from his head ; at the next he
replaces it :

Here, take my crown ; the life of Edward too :

\^Taki'ng off the crown.
Two kings in England cannot reign at once.
But stay a while ; let me be king till night,
That I may gaze upon this glittering crown ;
So shall my eyes receive their last content,
My head, the latest honour due to it,
And jointly both yield up their wishfed right.
Continue ever, thou celestial sun ;
Let never silent night possess this clime ;
Stand still, you watches of the element ;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay.
That Edward may be still fair England's king !

u u 2

66o SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Yet an answer must be given to the lords, and the
inevitable cannot be avoided :

Heavens and earth conspire
To make me miserable. Here, receive my crown.
Receive it ? no, these innocent hands of mine
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime ;
He of you all that most desires my blood.
And will be calFd the murderer of a king,
[j] Take it. What, are you mov'd ? pity you me ?

Then send for unrelenting Mortimer,
And Isabel, whose eyes being turn'd to steel,
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.
Yet stay ; for, rather than 111 look on them.
Here, here ! [Gives the crown,] Now, sweet God of heaven,
Make me despise this transitory pomp.
And sit for aye enthronised in heaven !
Come, death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or, if I live, let me forget myself !

The king s last thoughts are for his son :

Let not that Mortimer protect my son ;
More safety is there in a tiger*s jaws
Than his embracements. Bear this to the queen.
Wet with my tears, and dried again with sighs ;
If with the sight thereof she be not moved,
Return it back, and dip in my blood.
Commend me to my son, and bid him rule
Better than I. Yet how have I transgressed,
Unless it be with too much clemency ?

Now all is over with Edward. Dragged from place
to place, starved, and taunted, we find him no.xt at
Berkeley Castle in a dungeon underneath the moat
The aspect of the monarch, wasted with long watch
ing and fasting in his loathsome prison, suggests toe
much of that Euripidcan squalor which high tragedj
repudiates. Yet the kingliness with which he calls tc
mind his majesty of happier days, and bestows his
last jewel on the cutthroat sent to murder him, en-

EDWARD AT BERKELEY, 66i

nobles the revolting details Marlowe has thought fit
to accumulate. Lightborn, the assassin, enters the
dungeon with a lamp, and on the threshold recoils dis-
gusted by its venomous stench. The dialogue between
him and his victim, famous as it is, must be transcribed
at length :

K, Edw, Weep'st thou already ? list a while to me,
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is.
Or as Matrevis*, hewn from the Caucasus,
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale.
This dungeon where they keep me, is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.

Light. O villains !

A'. Edw, And there, in mire and puddle, have I stood
This ten days* space ; and, lest that I should sleep,
One plays continually upon a drum ;
They give me bread and water, being a king ;
So that for want of sleep and sustenance.
My mind 's distempered and my body 's numbed,
And whether I have limbs or not I know not.
O, would my blood dropped out from every vein,
As doth this water, from my tattered robes !
Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus.
When for her s^e I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont.

Z. O speak no more, my lord ; this breaks my heart.
Lie on this bed and rest yourself a while.

E, These looks of thine can harbour nought but death :
I see my tragedy written in thy brows.
Yet, stay a while ; forbear thy bloody hand,
And let me see the stroke before it comes ;
That even then when I shall lose my life.
My soul may be more steadfast on my God.

Z. What means your Highness to mistrust me thus?

E, What meanest thou to dissemble with me thus ?

Z. These hands were never stained with innocent blood,
Nor shall they now be tainted with a king's.

E, Forgive my thought for having such a thought.
One jewel have I left ; receive thou this ;
Still fear I, and I know not what 's the cause,
But every joint shakes as I give it thee.

662 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

0 I if thou har!)our'st murder in thy heart,

Let this gift change thy mind, and save thy soul !
Know that I am a king : O, at that name

1 feel a hell of grief ! \\Tiere is my crown ?
Gone, gone ! and do I yet remain alive ?

Z. You Ve overwatched, my lord ; lie down and rest.

E, But that grief keeps me waking I should sleep ;
For not these ten days have these eyelids closed.
Now, as I speak, they fall ; and yet with fear
Of)en again. O, wherefore sitt'st thou here ?

Z. If you mistrust me, I '11 begone, my lord.

E. No, no : for if thou meanest to murder me,
Thou wilt return again ; and therefore stay. [Sleeps.

Z. He sleeps.

E. O, let me not die yet ! O, stay a while 1

Z. How now, my lord ?

E. Something still buzzeth in my ears.
And tells me, if I sleep, I never wake :
This fear it is which makes me tremble thus ;
And therefore tell me ; wherefore art thou come ?

Z. To rid thee of thy life. — Matrevis, come !

Over what follows it were well to draw the veil ; for
Marlowe, with the savagery of his age, shows Edward
smothered, sparing only one incident of that unnatural
regicide.

XI.

The fifth of Marlowe's undoubted tragedies, pro-
duced in his own lifetime, is * The Massacre at Paris,'
This play was popular under its second title of ' The
Guise,' and, like the majority of the poet's dramatic
works, was written apparently to provide one great
actor with a telling part. As we possess it, the text
bears signs not only of hasty composition but also of
negligent printing. It is chiefly interesting for its fierce
anti- Papal feeling, inflamed to rabidness by the horrors
of S. Bartholomew. Yet, even from this point of view,

'TRAGEDY OF DIDO J 663

its passion falls far short of the concentrated rage
expressed by D*Aubign6 in ' Les Tragiques/ Nor
has Marlowe relieved the forcible feebleness of its
chaotic cruelties with any bursts of poetry or ringing
declamation.

* The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage/ was
left unfinished, and produced after Marlowe's death.
I have already expressed the opinion that this may
have been an early essay. In the main, it consists of
translations from the second and fourth books of the
* ^neid,' somewhat resembling the tumid style of the
lines declaimed in ' Hamlet ' by the player. But Mar-
lowe introduced one or two original scenes, character-
istic of his manner and of the fashion of the day. In
one of these Jupiter is * dallying with Idalian Gany-
mede,* petting his cup-bearer back into good humour
by the praise of a thousand pretty things. Hermes
lies asleep, with folded wings, beside them ; and the
picture is one that Correggio might have painted. In
another, Venus carries the boy lulus asleep to Ida :

Now is he fast asleep ; and in this grove,
Amongst green brakes, I '11 lay Ascanius,
And strew him with sweet-smelling violets.
Blushing roses, purple hyacinths ;
These milk-white doves shall be his centronels.

In a third, Cupid, who has assumed the form of
Ascanius, bewitches an old nurse, and sets her thinking
upon love. To tempt him away from Dido, she
invites him thus :

I have an orchard that hath store of plums,
Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates.
Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges ;
A garden where are beehives full of honey.

664 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Musk-roses, and a thousand sort of flowers ;
And in the midst doth run a silver stream,
Uliere thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap,
Wliite swans, and many lovely water-fowls.

The hyperbolical splendour of description running over
into nonsense, which Marlowe seems to have made
fashionable, and which Greene and Peele but feebly
imitated, is illustrated in Dido's offers of a fleet to
iEneas :

1 1\ give thee tackling made of rivelled gold.

Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees ;

Oars of massy ivory, full of holes.

Through which the water shall delight to play ;

Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks.

Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves ;

The mast whereon thy swelling sails shall hang.

Hollow pyramides of silver plate ;

The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought

The wars of Troy, — but not Troy's overthrow.

This IS in the true style of Hero's buskins ; and the
blank verse, falling in couplets, seems to cry aloud for
rhymes.

Much might be said about Marlowe's treatment of
Virgil's text, and the exaggerated, almost spasmodic,
attempt made to heighten the tragic tension of each
situation. Take the apparition of Hector's ghost for
an example :

Then buckled I mine armour, drew my sword.

And thinking to go down, came Hector's ghost.

With ashy visage, blueish sulphur eyes,

His arms torn from his shoulders, and his breast

Furrowed with wounds, and, that which made me weep,

Thongs at his heels, by which Achilles' horse

Drew him in triumph through the Greekish camp.

Burst from the earth, crying, * ^Eneas, fly !

Troy is a-fire, the Grecians have the town ! '

MARLOWE AND VIRGIL. 665

Instead of * blueish sulphur eyes/ 'arms torn off,' and
* breast furrowed with wounds/ Virgil writes :

Raptatus bigis ut quondam, aterque cruento
Pulvere, perque pedes trajectus lora tumentes.

Then, as though the vision were too horrible :

Hei mihi, qualis erat ! quantum mutatus ab illo
Hectore !

And when he speaks again of those wounds, he tem-
pers their disgrace :

quae circum plurima muros
Accepit patrios.

Nor does Virgil's Hector * burst from the earth/ but
steals upon ^neas like a dream in the first sleep of
night. Each of these points the translator misses ;
and, instead, presents us with the picture of a mangled
corpse, starting from the charnel, and shrieking a
shrill message of sudden woe. The neglect of modu-
lation and reserve is a main point in Elizabethan
tragedy. We may surmise that even Shakspere,
had he dealt with Hectors as he did with Hamlet's
fathers ghost, would have sought to intensify the
terror of the apparition at the expense of artistic
beauty.

XH.

I have reviewed, perhaps at intolerable length, the
authentic work of Marlowe as a dramatist. One play,
which bears his name upon the title-page, and which
passed till recently for his, namely, * Lust s Dominion,'
must be attributed to a feebler though imitative hand.

666 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

Nor do I think we can with certainty assign to Marlowe
any definite portions of the Shaksperian Histories.
That he had a hand in the first draughts which went
to form * Henry VI.' can be accepted ; and that his
influence may be traced in ' Edward HI.' is a tenable
theory. But in the absence of external evidence, it
would be vain to draw conjecture further, especially
when we have seen that the whole manner of that
epoch is saturated with the master s style.

Marlowe was great as a dramatist ; but as a poet
he was still greater. Even in his tragedies it is the
poet, rather than the playwright, who commands our
admiration. His characters are too often the mouth-
pieces of their maker s passionate oratory, rather than
beings gifted with a complex, independent vitality.
At another time I hope to study ' Hero and Leander
in combination with * Venus and Adonis,' * Salmac'
and Hermaphroditus/ and a few other narrative poer
of this epoch ; works in which our chiefest dramati
expressed their sense of beauty, unimpeded by tb
trical necessities. It will then be seen into how c
and lofty a region of pure poetry Marlowe soa
and in how true a sense he deserves the nan
pioneer and maker. Marlowe's contemporaries 1
in him a morning star of song, and marked him
the young Apollo of his age. Not the dramat'
the inspired artist, moved their panegyric wh
wrote of him. Let me conclude this ess
some of their testimonies, selecting only tho
seem to catch a portion of his spirit. Chapi
speak first of the dead friend who —

POETIC TRIBUTES TO MARLOWE. 667

Stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drank to me half this Musaean story,
Inscribing it to deathless memory.

Peele shall follow with his tribute to the poet s grave :

Unhappy in thine end,
Marley, the Muses* darling for thy verse.
Fit to write passions for the souls below,
If any wretched souls in passion speak.

Drayton shall tell how —

Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs.
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had ; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear ;
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

Petowe, less renowned, less skilful, but hardly less
discriminating, sings of—

Mario admired, whose honey-flowing vein
No English writer can as yet attain.
Whose name in Fame's immortal treasury
Truth shall record to deathless memory,
Mario, late mortal, now framed all divine —

and hails his entrance into the heaven of poetry ;
where :

Mario, still-admirbd Mario 's gone
To live with beauty in Elysium —
Immortal beauty, who desires to hear
His sacred poesies sweet in every ear.

These laurels, which were showered on Marlowes
hearse, are still evergreen. The most impassioned
singer of our own day, Charles Algernon Swinburne,
has scattered the roses and lilies of high-sounding

668 SHAKSPERE'S PREDECESSORS.

verse and luminous prose upon that poet's tomb. One
of the noblest, as he is now the eldest of our poets,
Richard Home, has digested the romance of his un-
timely death into a worthy tragedy. Yet why should
we use the language of the grave in speaking about
Marlowe ?

He has outsoarcd the shadow of our night ;
Env7 and cahimny, and hate and pain.
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again.

His nightingales, * the glad dear angels of the spring'
of English poetry, survive and fill our ears with music.
They are not dead, although —

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,

Thai sometime grew within this learnM man.

LONDON : fRINTKO BV

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